
i 'I I OK Nil. NINK Al.TAHS, FOUNTAINS A3 



[Frontispiece. 



MOTOR TOURS 
IN YORKSHIRE 



BY 

MRS. RODOLPH STAWELL 

AUTHOR OF " MOTOR TOURS IN WALES," ETC 



WITH PHOTOGRAPHS BY R. DE S. STAWELL 



HODDER AND STOUGHTON 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 









THE LIBRARY 
OF CONGRESS 



WASHINGTON 




CONTENTS 



PAGE 

THE DALES . . . . .1 



THE COAST ..... 87 

III 

CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES .... 117 

IV 
YORK AND THE SOUTH .... 167 



ILLUSTEATIONS 

THE CHAPEL OF THE NINE ALTARS, FOUNTAINS 

abbey . . . . . Frontispiece 

FACING PAGE 

THE CONDUIT COURT, SKIPTON CASTLE . 8 

FROM THE ROAD NEAR BARDEN TOWER . .20 
BOLTON PRIORY .... 22 

THE CHOIR, BOLTON PRIORY . 24' 

THE NAVE, FOUNTAINS ABBEY . . 38 

THE TOWER, FOUNTAINS ABBEY . . .40 
FOUNTAINS HALL .... 42 

CHAPTER HOUSE, JERVAULX ABBEY . . 48 
BOLTON CASTLE . . . . 60 

ASKRIGG . . . . . .66 

THE BUTTERTUBS PASS . . . 68 V 

THE SWALE . . . .70 

RICHMOND ..... 74 

GRETA BRIDGE . . . . .80 



VI 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



THE DAIRY BRIDGE 

HIGH FORCE . 

THE CLIFF, STAITHES 

THE QUAY, STAITHES . 

THE HARBOUR, STAITHES . 

RUNSWICK BAY . 

WHITBY ABBEY .... 

WHITBY HARBOUR . 

WHITBY ABBEY, INTERIOR . 

WHITBY CHURCH, FROM THE ABBEY . 

WHITBY HARBOUR .... 

ROBIN HOOD'S BAY . . . . 

MOORS BETWEEN WHITBY AND SCARBOROUGH 

THE VILLAGE OF LASTINGHAM 

LASTINGHAM CROSS 

HODGE BECK . . . . . 

KIRKDALE ..... 

DOUBLE ENTRANCE TO HELMSLEY CASTLE 

RIEVAULX ABBEY FROM THE TERRACE 

RIEVAULX ABBEY . 



PAGE 

821/ 

se- 
94 
96> 
98 

100^ 

102^ 

104^ 

106 

108' 

110 

112 

128 

132 

136 

140 

144 

148 

150 



ILLUSTRATIONS 



FACING PAGE 

CHANCEL ARCH, RIEVAULX ABBEY . . 152 

SHERIFF HUTTON CASTLE .... 160' 
GATEWAY OF KIRKHAM PRIORY . . 164 

WALMGATE BAR, YORK .... 170 

MICKLEGATE BAR, YORK . . . 172 

YORK MINSTER ..... 176 

ST. MARY'S ABBEY, YORK . . 182" 

BOOTHAM BAR, YORK .... 184 

STREET IN YORK .... 186 

NORMAN DOORWAY IN PONTEFRACT CASTLE . 192 

WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ABBEY . . 202 

CHAPTER HOUSE, HOWDEN .... 210 
BEVERLEY ..... 214 



THE DALES 



SUMMARY OF TOUR THROUGH THE DALES 
Distances. 



Skipton 






(Ingleton and back, via Malham 


.. 62 


miles) 


Hubberholme 


.. 20 




Bolton Bridge , 


.. 22 




Ripon 


.. 33 




(Fountains and back 

Askrigg 


.. 9 
.. 33 


,. ) 


Richmond, via Buttertubs Pass 


.. 31 




High Force 


.. 30 




Total 


.. 240 


miles 



Roads. 
No bad hills except on Buttertubs Pass — which is 
precipitous in parts — and in Richmond. 
Surface : usually good. 



I 

THE DALES 

TTN the motorist's life there are hours that 
-*- can never be forgotten. It may be some 
hour of sunshine that haunts us, when the 
warm wind, we remember, was heavy with 
the scent of gorse or pungent with the sting- 
ing breath of the sea ; or some hour when 
the road lay white and straight before us 
across a moor, and the waves of heather 
rolled away from us to the horizon in long 
curves of colour, and as we sped over the 
miles we seemed no nearer to the shore of 
the purple sea nor to the end of the white 
straight road ; or it may be, perhaps, the 
hour of our gradual approach to some ancient 
city transfigured in the sunset, " soft as old 
sorrow, bright as old renown." But, what- 
ever the scene may be, whether moor or fen, 



4 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

forest or shore, there are two elements which 
are always present in the motorist's memory 
of a happy run — a good surface, and a good 
engine. 

No one could travel in Yorkshire, I think, 
without adding to his store of unforgotten 
hours. So great is the variety of scenery 
and interest that all must somewhere find 
the landscape that appeals to them. Some 
will remember those moors of Cleveland that 
have no visible limit, and some the many- 
coloured dales of the West Riding, and some 
the straight roads of the plain where the 
engine hums so gaily. Some will ever after 
dream of the day when they followed the 
course of the wooded Tees ; others will dream 
of the distant towers of York or Beverley, 
or of the heights and depths of the Butter- 
tubs Pass. And, to be quite frank, there are 
some to whom this last exciting dream will 
be rather of the nature of a nightmare. 

In more ways than one Yorkshire is a good 
field for motoring. Throughout the greater 
part of the county there are few hedges, and 
the stone walls that take the place of these 
are low. The roads are wide and their surface 



THE DALES 5 

good, except in unfrequented places. Now in 
Yorkshire the places that are unfrequented 
are very few indeed, and it is in connection 
with this fact that the motorist has the 
greatest advantage over every other kind of 
tourist. He can choose his own time for 
visiting Bolton or Fountains or the incompar- 
able Rievaulx ; he can see them when the 
dew is on the grass and the glamour of soli- 
tude is in the woods, To be alone with our 
emotions is what we all desire in the presence 
of wide spaces or stately aisles ; and in this 
county, where there is so much beauty to be 
seen and so many to see it, those only who 
possess " speed as a chattel " can ever hope 
to be alone. It is almost impossible to lay 
too much stress on our advantages, as motor- 
ists, in this matter of securing peace. 

Looking back upon a tour among the York- 
shire dales, I see that the keynote was struck 
at the very outset by the little town of Skip- 
ton, with its grey granite houses and slated 
roofs, its wide street and the castle above 
it, the ancient church and the tombs of the 
great. Such are a hundred Yorkshire villages 
and little towns. Each of them, it seems, is 



6 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

connected with some historic name. In the 
case of Skipton the name is Clifford. If the 
first builders of the castle and the church 
were not Cliffords, but de Romilles, it was the 
Cliffords who made both castle and church 
what they now are. It was a Clifford who 
built the long gallery and the octagon tower 
that we see beyond the grass of the great 
outer court; it was a Clifford who repaired 
all the other towers ; a Clifford who devised 
the curious shell-pictures that line the guard- 
room ; Cliffords who lived for centuries in the 
castle, and the few Cliffords that died in their 
beds who enriched the church with their 
tombs. Their motto, " Desormais" stands up 
against the sky in letters of stone above the 
round towers of their gateway, and their 
arms are carved above the inner door. 
The court on which this door opens, the 
" Conduit Court," as it is called, is the very core 
of Skipton, and one of the most romantic 
places I have ever seen. It would seize the 
dullest imagination — this little paved en- 
closure shut in on every side, the long flight 
of steps, the doorways with the crumbling 
carvings, the mullioned windows, the yew- 



THE DALES 7 

tree that has seen so many centuries, the low 
stone seat with its shields, the Norman arch- 
way through which all the Cliffords have 
passed. Most of the feet that came this way 
awoke ringing echoes under the old arch, 
for the Cliffords were wont to be dressed 
in coats of mail. They were all mighty in 
war. The first armour-clad baron of the 
name, he who began the building of this 
court and died at Bannockburn, has clattered 
through this doorway; and after him the 
hero of Cre<jy; and later on that other who 
fought for Henry V. and died at Meaux ; and 
he who fell at St. Albans in the cause of 
Lancaster ; and his son and avenger, called 
" the Butcher," who slew that " fair gentle- 
men and maiden-like person," the young Earl 
of Rutland, and was himself slain at Towton ; 
and the great sailor, Cumberland, who made 
nine voyages and fought the Spaniards for 
Queen Elizabeth. Here, too, when he came 
to his own at last, has stood that strange, 
romantic figure, the Shepherd Lord, who 
spent his youth in hiding among the northern 
hills, yet who, despite his love of solitude and 
learning, could not forget his long ancestry 



8 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

of fighting men, and himself fought on 
Flodden Field. 

Among all these heroes the kings who have 
come through this doorway cut rather a sorry- 
figure : Edward II., a sorry figure in any 
company ; Richard III., a usurper here as in 
larger courts, playing the master while the 
true lord of Skipton was keeping sheep ; and 
Henry VIII., who came here to take part in 
a wedding — a spectator for once. The bride 
on this occasion was his niece, Eleanor 
Brandon, the daughter of that love-match 
that was so great a failure, between the 
Duke of Suffolk and Mary, Princess of 
England and Queen Dowager of France. 
The wedding ceremony took place in the 
long gallery, which was built for the occasion 
by the bridegroom's father. Lady Eleanor's 
granddaughter, Lady Pembroke, was more 
closely connected with this spot where we 
are standing than any Clifford who came 
before her. 

Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, who 
rustled through this archway many a time, 
no doubt, while the castle of her ancestors 
was being repaired at her charges, was a 



THE DALES 9 

very busy woman. " Her house was a home 
for the young, and a retreat for the aged ; 
an asylum for the persecuted, a college 
for the learned, and a pattern for all." She 
restored six castles, we are told, and built 
seven churches and two hospitals ; she erected 
a monument to Spenser ; she wrote some 
memoirs, too, with a record of all these 
things, and wherever she made her mark 
she stamped her initials. You can see them, 
very large and clear, if you look overhead 
upon the leaden spouting of this court, and 
you may see them again in the windows of the 
church. Anne Clifford's disposition was in no 
respect a retiring one, as we may gather from 
her famous answer to the Secretary of State 
who wished a nominee of his own to stand 
for her borough of Appleby. "I have been 
bullied by a usurper," she said, " and neglected 
by a Court, but I will not be dictated to by 
a subject. Your man shall not stand." 

Her work in restoring her castle of Skipton 
was no light undertaking, for it had lately 
endured a three years' siege by the army of 
the Parliament, and its seven towers must 
have been sadly battered before the day of 



10 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

its proud surrender. So defiant was that 
surrender that the garrison marched out 
through the great entrance gate beneath 
the motto of the Cliffords, " accordingley to 
the Honour of a Souldier, with colours flying, 
Trumpets sounding, Drums beating, Matches 
lighted at both ends, and Bullets in their 
Mouthes," while the commissioned officers took 
with them " their wearing apparell that was 
properley their owne in their Portmantles." 
One other pious work did Anne perform. 
She made a magnificent tomb for her father 
the Admiral, third Earl of Cumberland — who 
fought the Armada with the Queen's glove 
in his hat — and she set upon it seventeen 
armorial shields, all gilt and painted, and 
a mighty black marble slab, and a list of 
honours. We may see it in the chancel of 
the church she repaired ; this grey church 
that stands so picturesquely at the end of 
the long street, with the hollyhocks and 
daisies brightening its dark walls. Opposite 
to the grave of Lady Pembroke's father is 
that of her little brother, " an infant of most 
rare towardness in all the appearances that 
might promise wisdome " ; and near to this 



THE DALES 11 

is the splendid tomb, with restored brasses, 
of the first Earl of Cumberland. Such of 
the earlier Cliffords as found burial at all, 
including the Shepherd Lord, were laid in 
Bolton Abbey, whose monks were connected 
with this church and gave it the delicately 
carved screen that adds so much to its 
beauty. 

It is sometimes said or hinted that Jane 
Clifford, the Rose of the World, was in some 
way connected with Skipton. This can hardly 
be the case, however, for the Fair Rosamund 
was born and spent her childhood on the 
banks of the Wye, and was laid in her 
temporary grave at Godstowe long before 
Edward II. gave this castle to the Cliffords 
who came after her. 

From Skipton, where homely comfort may 
be found at the sign of the " Black Horse," an 
expedition should be made to Malham and its 
famous Cove, about twelve miles away ; and 
if time allows, the run may be lengthened 
very enjoyably by rejoining the main road 
at Hellifield and skirting the moors as far 
as Clapham or Ingleton. In this way we 
shall see something of the craggy country of 



12 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Craven, of which Camden wrote long ago : 
" What with huge stones, steep rocks, and 
rough ways, this place is very wild and 
unsightly." The huge stones and steep rocks 
are still there, but the way by which we go 
is very far from being rough ; it is, on the 
contrary, such an exceptionally fine road that 
it seems almost a pity to leave it. Those 
who wish to see Malham, however, must turn 
off at Gargrave or Coniston. 

Much has been written concerning Malham 
Cove, and many long adjectives used. Some 
writers have even declared themselves terri- 
fied by it ; but these, I think, must have been 
of a timid temperament. It is the position 
of the place, no doubt, that has this over- 
whelming effect upon some minds : the sudden 
and unexpected presence of a great semi-circu- 
lar cliff amid quiet undulating fields. If one 
could be carried blindfold to the foot of it 
I can imgine that it would be truly imposing ; 
but it is visible from a distance as a grey 
scar on the face of the green hillside, and 
thus a good deal of its effect is lost in the 
course of a gradual approach. The best way 
to reach it is to walk across the fields from 



THE DALES 13 

Malham village, following the course of the 
Aire, the stream that tunnels its way so 
strangely into the Cove. There is, it is true, 
a narrow and steep road which commands 
a fine view of it as a whole, but there is 
no room here for any but a small car to 
turn, and there is no doubt that the cliff 
can best be seen on foot. 

This is true also of its more impos- 
ing neighbour, Gordale Scar. Says Words- 
worth — 

" Let thy feet repair 

To Gordale chasm, terrific as the lair 

Where young lions couch," 

and indeed, as the hill that approaches Gor- 
dale Chasm is nearly as terrific as the chasm 
itself, it is certainly best, if not imperative, 
to repair to it on thy feet. I believe that the 
tarn which lies upon the moor above Malham 
Cove, and long ago belonged to the monks 
of Fountains, may be reached by road, but 
I have not been there myself. 

From Malham the way is narrow and sur- 
prisingly tortuous as far as Hellifield, but 
here we rejoin the splendid high road we 
left at Coniston, and speed along it through 



U MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Ribblesdale to Settle. This small town has 
progressive ambitions, It "treats" the sur- 
face of its main road, it lights its streets 
by electricity, it has a fine new garage and 
a hotel that has the air of being nice. It 
is attractive, too, and pretty as well as praise- 
worthy, with hills behind it and a tiny weir 
above the bridge. Beyond it we pass the 
ebbing and flowing spring of Giggleswick in 
its stone basin by the wayside; climb the 
long hill under the grey crags of Giggleswick 
Scar, with a splendid backward view, and 
run down by wood and beck to Clapham, 
where the village cross stands close to the 
stream in the shadow of the trees. Not very 
far away is the famous cave, bristling with 
stalactites. After leaving Clapham we cross 
a wide heath, with the throttle open. 

First and last this is a good run. On the 
left is the open country; on the right that 
wild land of huge stones and steep rocks that 
seemed to Camden so unsightly, in an age 
when the whole duty of a landscape was to 
smile. Clambering on the hillside in a cleft 
of the crags are the narrow, winding streets 
of Ingleton, and a viaduct spanning the 



THE DALES 15 

valley. This valley, which is hardly wider 
than a gorge, is said to be well worth 
exploring ; but neither its waterfall, Thornton 
Force, nor its caves of Yordas and Weather- 
cote, can be seen by road. They hardly 
concern us here. It concerns us rather to 
return to Skipton, and thence to strike up 
into the heart of the hills. 

Climbing the road above the castle we see 
how Skipton lies in a hollow among the 
moors. Behind us to the south is the Bronte 
country ; Haworth and its graves far off 
beyond Airedale, and Stonegappe only three 
miles away. It was at Stonegappe that 
Charlotte reluctantly taught the little Sidg- 
wicks, and no doubt made them suffer nearly 
as much as she suffered herself from her 
over-sensitive feelings. Embsay Moor appears 
on our right as we rise, and beyond it the 
savage outline of Rylstone Fell, with the 
ruined watch-tower of the Nortons, the foes 
of the Cliffords, showing desolately against 
the sky upon the topmost crag. Of the 
Nortons and their tower, and the daughter 
of their house, and of the White Doe of 
Rylstone and her weekly journey across the 



16 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

moors to the grave of the youth with whom 
the Nortons ended, Wordsworth has told us. 
We are running down now into "the valley 
small," where the house of the Nortons once 
stood, and here is the Church where 

"the bells of Bylstone played 
Their Sabbath music — God tts ayde I " 

At Threshfield we turn to the left and are 
in Wharfedale. 

The names of all these Yorkshire Dales 
are very familiar in our ears. Wharfedale, 
Wensleydale, Swaledale, Teesdale — they are 
all words with a charm in them. And here, 
as we glide out of a wood, is Wharfedale 
spread before us ; and we know at last that 
it is not only in the name that the charm 
lies. 

The river flows below through the wide 
valley and winds away in shining curves into 
the far distance, past the bluff outline of 
Kilnsey Crag, past the dark belt of firs, till 
it vanishes among the folds of the jewelled 
hills. For in their liquid brilliancy the 
colouring of all these dales is that of gems, 
of amethyst and emerald, of sapphire and 



THE DALES 17 

turquoise and opal ; and the sunlight that 
floods them on the days when we are 
fortunate has the luminous gold of the 
topaz. As we drive under the overhanging 
crag of Kilnsey — " the highest and steepest 
that ever I saw," says Camden — and pass the 
tiny village where the sheep belonging to the 
Abbey of Fountains used to be shorn, the 
hills begin to close in, till, as we draw near 
Kettlewell, they rise round us so protectively 
that we seem to have entered a new and 
calmer world. Kettlewell itself is so calm as 
to appear asleep. Its grey houses, shadowed 
by trees and sheltered by the mighty shoulder 
of Great Whernside, are defended from every 
wind, and from every sound but the rippling 
of the Wharfe. Beyond this peaceful spot, 
where we cross the river, the road is rather 
rough, and after passing through pretty 
Buckden it is also extremely narrow. How- 
ever, it leads to Hubberholme, and no more 
than that need be asked of any road. 

At Hubberholme the river is still wide, and 

thickly strewn with stones ; the slopes of the 

hills are very near and steep, and are clothed 

with bracken and fir-trees, and deeply cleft 

3 



18 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

by tiny becks ; masses of wild flowers fringe 
the banks with clouds of mystic blue ; and 
beyond an old stone bridge stands the church, 
low and grey, with a paved pathway and a 
porch bright with crimson ramblers. The 
rough walls have stood in this lonely spot 
for many centuries. The door is open, and 
we may see for ourselves the strange state 
of the masonry within, whose builders, when 
they left it thus rugged and unplastered, 
little thought that its unfinished appearance 
would be tenderly cherished by the anti- 
quarians of a future age. A rare rood-loft 
of oak divides the tiny chancel from the 
nave. This loft dates from the year 1558, 
the last year that the Old Faith reigned in 
England ; and in this remote hiding-place 
among the hills it escaped the vigilant eye 
of Elizabeth and the destructive hands of 
the Puritans. 

On returning to Kettlewell we shall find 
it worth our while to continue the journey 
down the dale on the road that passes 
through Conistone, for though it is not so 
good, as regards surface, as that on the right 
bank of the river, it commands a different 



THE DALES 19 

— and a very lovely — series of views. From 
Grassington we cross to Linton, on the right 
bank, where there are some little falls whose 
prettiness is hardly striking enough to 
allure us from our way ; and at Burnsall 
we should keep to the same side of the 
stream rather than follow the public con- 
veyances to the left bank. Horse-drawn 
travellers may well be excused for shirking 
the hill above Burnsall ; but few gradients 
have any terrors for us, and the backward 
view of Wharfedale from the high hillside 
is more beautiful than anything we have yet 
seen in Yorkshire. The two roads meet near 
Barden Tower, the beloved retreat of the 
Shepherd Lord. 

Henry, the tenth Lord Clifford, was a very 
small boy when his father, " the Butcher," lost 
his estates, his cause, and his life, on the blood- 
red grass of Towton. It was not without 
reason that John Clifford was surnamed " the 
Butcher." It was in vain that young Rutland 
knelt to him for mercy on Wakefield Bridge, 
"holding up both his hands and making 
dolorous countenance, for his speech was 
gone for fear." " By God's blood," snarled 



20 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Clifford, "thy father slew mine, and so will 
I do thee and all thy kin ! " And he plunged 
his dagger into the boy's heart. " In this 
act," says the historian, "the Lord Clifford 
was accounted a tyrant and no gentleman. 
With his hands still dyed with the son's blood 
he savagely cut off the head of the dead 
father, the busy, plotting head of Richard, 
Duke of York, and carried it, crowned with 
paper, "in great despite and much derision," 
to the Lancastrian Queen. " Madam, your 
war is done," he cried, " here is your King's 
ransom!" Margaret of Anjou, for all her 
manly ways, became rather hysterical at the 
hideous sight, laughing violently with pale 
lips ; and Clifford's triumph was short. 
While he lay with an arrow through his 
throat upon the field of Towton — which we 
shall see later on — his little son was hurried 
away to a shepherd's hut in the north, where 
in the course of twenty-five years or so on 
the hillside he learnt more than the tending 
of sheep. He became the gentlest of his 
line, a lover of learning, a watcher of the 
skies ; and though at last Skipton came back 
to him, and Brougham, and Pendragon, and 




PROM THE ROAD NEAR BAKDKN ToWK.lt. 



THE DALES 21 

many another castle, he lived here quietly 
in this simple tower above the wooded 
Wharfe, befriending the poor, reading his 
books, and now and then reading the stars 
as well, with his friends the monks of Bolton. 

"And ages after he was laid in earth, 
The good Lord Clifford was the name he bore." 

His descendant, the notable Lady Pem- 
broke, whose initials are so conspicuous at 
Skipton, expended some of her energy here 
at Barden. This was one of the six castles 
she restored, and over the door we may read 
the inscription she placed there according to 
her habit, with all her names and titles 
recorded at length, and a reference to a 
complimentary text about " the repairer of 
the breach." 

Those who wish to see the famous Strid — 
and none should miss the sight — may leave 
their cars by the wayside at a point not very 
far from Barden Tower; but this is not the 
course I recommend. The Bolton woods are 
beautiful beyond description, and it is only 
by walking or driving through them from 
the Abbey to the Strid, or even to Barden 



22 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Tower, that one can fully enjoy their ferny 
slopes and serried stems, and the little shining 
streams that slip through them to the 
Wharfe. George Eliot and George Lewes 
once spent a whole day wandering together 
along these paths, and we might follow in 
their footsteps very happily, I think. Those 
who prefer to drive must hire carriages, for 
motors are not admitted to the woods ; but 
the existence of a very nice little hotel at 
Bolton Bridge makes everything easy. 

By one means or another the Strid must 
be seen. Here the Wharfe is contracted into 
a narrow cleft, an abrupt chasm between 
low masses of rock ; and the angry river, 
suddenly straitened in its course, has in its 
convulsions bitten into the stone till it is 
riddled with a thousand holes and hollows. 
When the river is low it is possible to leap 
across from rock to rock. This is the leap 
that Alice de Meschines' boy attempted but 
failed to achieve so many years ago, when 
the hounds he held in leash hesitated to 
follow him, and so dragged him back into 
the torrent. " I will make many a poor 
man's son my heir," said his mother ; and 




BOLTON l'HIOKV. 



THE DALES 23 

the priory that her parents had founded at 
Embsay was moved by her to Bolton, and 
greatly enriched in memory of the drowned 
Boy of Egremond. Here is the stone from 
which he leapt, they say, and here the stone 
he never reached, and both are polished by 
the feet of those who have been more 
successful. This legend — and I fear the 
unkinder " myth " would be the more accurate 
word — has prompted several poets to make 
verses, but has signally failed to inspire them. 
All that is left of Bolton Priory is before 
us when we reach the Cavendish Memorial. 
Close to this spot, though hidden from the 
road, is the log hut known as Hartington 
Seat, the point of view whence the ruin 
looks its loveliest. We are at the edge of 
a wooded cliff. The Priory lies far below 
us in its level graveyard, framed in trees ; 
the river sweeps away from our feet, and 
after curving thrice, disappears into the 
blue haze of the hills. Between the church- 
yard and the foot of the red cliffs beyond 
the Wharfe lies the regular line of the 
monks' stepping-stones, by which for many 
centuries, probably, the congregation of the 



24 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

faithful came from the hills to their de- 
votions ; and came, too, on other occasions, 
laden with fruit or game for the hospitable 
table of the prior. Do not go to Bolton on 
a bank holiday, nor, if you can help it, in 
August, lest you should find as many people 
as were there in the days of its splendour, 
when the canons and the lay-brethren and 
the men-at-arms and the thirty servants 
and the unnumbered serfs and the frequent 
guests made it a stirring place. Yet it is 
always possible to find an early hour when 
there is peace in the ruined choir, where 
somewhere in the shadow of the arcaded 
walls the dust of the Shepherd Lord lies 
under the grass. Bolton was sold to the 
Shepherd's son, the first Earl of Cumber- 
land, at the time of the Dissolution, when 
the building of the west tower was brought 
to a sudden standstill, and the nave, the 
parish church, was separated by a wall 
from the choir, the monks' church, which 
would be needed no more. There stands 
the tower, still unfinished ; and here is the 
nave, now, as then, a parish church, where 
for seven hundred years without interrup- 



THE DALES 25 

tion, it is said, services have been held 
Sunday by Sunday. The beauty of the 
interior, unfortunately, is not great. The 
Early Victorian Age has left its fatal stamp 
upon it. It was not till forty years ago 
that the walls were cleansed of whitewash ; 
and in 1851 a large sum of money was 
mis-spent at the Great Exhibition in ac- 
quiring some dreadful glass. 

The motorist's route from Bolton Bridge 
to Harrogate is undoubtedly the moorland 
road by Blubberhouses. The contour-book 
describes it as rough and steep ; but the 
steepness is nowhere very severe, and the 
surface is now excellent, while the moors 
have their usual charms — charms not only 
for the artist, though these are appealing 
enough, but special charms for the motorist 
too, the delight of an unfenced road and 
a wide country. Not that this road lies 
altogether on the moors. There are woods 
here and there, and soft, green beds of 
bracken, and slopes of massive rock ; and 
presently we pass the great reservoir of the 
Leeds waterworks. Then the country opens 
out again, and we have a series of fine 



26 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

wide views till Harrogate appears below 
us, occupying a considerable proportion of 
the landscape. 

Harrogate is exactly what one would expect 
it to be : a place of large hotels and fine 
shops, a place whose ideals are comfort and 
prosperity. Those who like to motor round 
a centre — a plan which has many advan- 
tages — could hardly find a better base for 
their operations. 

"The great merit of Harrowgate," wrote 
George Eliot, " is that one is everywhere 
close to lovely open walks." Our field has 
widened since her day, but Harrogate's 
great merit is still its merit as a centre. 
In this respect it is superior even to York, 
though in itself not worthy to be named 
with that incomparable city. To the west, 
within easy distance, are Nidderdale and 
Wharfedale; to the north are Ripon, Foun- 
tains, and Jervaulx, with Middleham and 
even Wensleydale for the enterprising ; to 
the south is Kirkstall Abbey on the out- 
skirts of Leeds. Byland and Rievaulx may 
be seen in a single day's drive, and only 
twenty-one miles away is York itself. 



THE DALES 27 

Harrogate is so entirely, so aggressively 
modern, so resolute to let bygones be by- 
gones, that one learns with something of a 
shock how it came by its name. Harro- 
gate, it appears, means the Soldiers' Hill on 
the Road. The soldiers who lived on the 
hill were Roman : the road was the Roman 
road through the forest of Knaresborough. 
Except for this faint hint of an earlier and 
more strenuous life, the history of Harro- 
gate is the history of its "Spaw." These 
crowded acres were a bare, uninhabited 
common at the end of the sixteenth cen- 
tury, when Captain Slingsby, wandering one 
day across the Stray, was led by the tewits 
to a spring that cured him of his ills, 
which had hitherto yielded only to the 
waters of Germany. He set a roof over 
the precious spot, and so this spring became 
the fons et origo of modern Harrogate. 
And the Stray, though now in the heart 
of a large town, is still uninhabited, still 
common-land ; for a century after the dis- 
covery of the Tewit Well, when hotels were 
already thick upon the surrounding ground, 
an Act of Parliament was passed by which 



28 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

two hundred acres of land were presented 
for ever to the people of Harrogate, to 
serve for the daily walks of those who 
drank the waters. 

At Knaresborough, only three miles further 
on, we are in a very different world, the 
world of old houses and older tales, of 
monarchs and saints, of William the Con- 
queror and the proud de Stutteville, of 
Richard, king in name but not in deed, and 
of Oliver, king in deed but not in name — 
an inspiring world, one would think. The 
first view of the town, too — the river, and 
the high, unusual bridge, and the red 
houses on the hillside, and above them the 
castle that had once so proud a crown of 
towers — seems to promise much. Looking 
at that fragment of a fortress we re- 
member those who have owned it ; the de 
Burgh who built it ; the de Stutteville who 
fought in the Battle of the Standard ; Piers 
Gaveston, who is better forgotten ; de 
Morville, murderer of Beckett, hiding here 
from justice ; Queen Philippa, whom we are 
glad to remember for any reason ; John 
of Gaunt ; Charles I. And we remember 



THE DALES 29 

Richard II., a prisoner in the one tower 
that still stands, alone with his humiliat- 
ing memories. 

This one glimpse of the castle and its 
past, however, is all that Knaresborough 
can give us of romance. It is almost best 
to ask no more, for a nearer view of the 
crumbling keep will leave us very sad. 
The path that leads to it, the path that 
took de Morville to safety and Richard to 
prison, is neatly asphalted, and lighted with 
gas-lamps on stone bases, which the local 
guide-book describes as "ornamental." Hard 
by the door through which the sad king 
passed from his shame at Westminster, and 
went forth again to the mystery of Pon- 
tefract, stands a penny-in-the-slot machine. 
A custodian will show us the guardroom 
and its relics, and even the dungeon ; but 
we must be careful to look at them in the 
right order, or we shall be rebuked. The 
wolf-trap must be seen before the Con- 
queror's chest, and Philippa's chest before 
the armour from Marston Moor. By this 
time the glamour has faded. Even the fine 
view from the castle rock must be in- 



30 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

spected — inspected is the right word — from 
nicely painted seats, placed at regular in- 
tervals in the shelter of clipped evergreens. 
The most satisfactory place in Knares- 
borough is the Old Manor beside the river, 
where the original " roof -tree " round which 
the house was built still grows up through 
the rooms, and would be taller if a too 
zealous workman had not aspired to "make 
it tidy." A great deal of beautiful furniture 
has been gathered in the panelled rooms, 
including the sturdy and simple oak bed- 
stead in which Oliver Cromwell slept when 
he was staying in the house that faces the 
Crown Hotel, in the upper part of the 
town. Perhaps the bed was brought here 
when Oliver's lodging was pulled down and 
rebuilt, as happened some time ago. The 
floor of his room was carefully preserved ; 
that floor on which the landlady's little 
girl, peeping through the keyhole at " this 
extraordinary person," saw him kneeling at 
his prayers. It was in this town that he 
gathered his troops to meet the Scottish 
invasion, and from hence that he marched 
out, by way of Otley, Skipton, and Clitheroe, 



THE DALES 31 

to defeat the Duke of Hamilton at Preston. 
The siege of the castle was not his work : 
Fairfax had taken it by assault some years 
earlier. Cromwell had sad memories in 
connection with Knaresborough, for it was 
somewhere in its neighbourhood that his 
second boy, Oliver, was killed. " I thought 
he looked sad and wearied," said a contem- 
porary who met him just before the battle 
of Marston Moor, "for he had had a sad 
loss — young Oliver had got killed to death 
not long before, I heard ; it was near 
Knaresborough." 

To see the Dropping Well we must cross 
the river by bridge or ferry, and walk 
along a pretty path under the beeches. 
Here, as everywhere in Knaresborough, 
disillusion dogs our steps. This beautiful 
curiosity of nature, this great overhanging 
rock, worn smooth by the perpetual drip- 
ping of the water, framed in moss and 
ferns, has been made into a " side-show," 
with a railing, an entrance fee, and a row 
of bowler hats, stuffed parrots, and other 
ornaments in process of petrifaction. On 
the other side of the river is St. Robert's 



32 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Chapel. Here, too, the world is too much 
with us. 

Leland, that stout traveller, who "was 
totally enflammid with a love to see 
thoroughly al those partes of this opulente 
and ample reaulme . . . and notid yn so 
doing a hole worlde of thinges very memor- 
able," tells us how Robert Flower, the son 
of a man " that had beene 2 tymes mair of 
York," came to these rocks by the river 
Nidd "desiring a solitarie life as an her- 
mite." He made himself this chapel, " hewen 
owte of the mayne stone " ; and he seems to 
have had some persuasive power of good- 
ness or wisdom that turned his enemies 
into friends. " King John was ons of an 
il-wille to this Robert Flour," yet ended by 
benefiting him and his, an unusual de- 
velopement in the case of King John ; and 
de Stutteville, who lived up at the castle, 
had actually set out to raid the hermitage, 
suspecting it to harbour thieves, when he 
too, persuaded by a vision or otherwise, 
suddenly became the hermit's friend. This 
tiny sanctuary, eight or nine feet long, with 
its altar and groined roof and recesses for 



THE DALES 33 

relics, all wrought in the solid rock, would 
be a place to stimulate the imagination if 
it were not that the surroundings and the 
guide are such as would cause the strongest 
imagination to wilt. 

Some say that the black slab of marble 
which is now a memorial to Sir Henry 
Slingsby in the parish church once formed 
the altar-top in St. Robert's Chapel ; others 
say it came from the Priory, and was raised 
there in honour of the saint who " forsook his 
fair lands " and caused the Priory's founda- 
tion. The slab lies in the Slingsby chapel, 
and records that Sir Henry was executed 
"by order of the tyrant Cromwell." Carlyle 
tells us that this Slingsby, " a very constant 
Royalist all along," was condemned for plot- 
ting the betrayal of Hull to the Royalists. 

The road from Knaresborough to Ripon 
follows the valley of the Nidd as far as 
Ripley. This village has the air of being a 
feudal survival. Its cottages with their neat- 
ness and their flowers, its Hotel de Ville, and 
even the " treated " surface of its excellent 
road, all bear the stamp of a close connec- 
tion with the castle whose park gates are 
4 



34 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

at the corner. In the sixteenth century the 
village of Ripley was under the eye of a 
very masterful lady. It was to this castle 
that Oliver Cromwell, tired from fighting 
on Marston Moor, came in search of rest. 
Rest, however, was denied him. His hostess, 
whose husband was away, had no sympathy 
with fatigue that came from resisting the 
King's Majesty, and so poor Oliver — "sad 
and wearied," as we know, even before the 
battle — spent the night on a chair in the 
hall, while Lady Ingilby, seated opposite 
to him with a couple of pistols in her 
hands, kept her relentless eye upon him 
till the morning. When he rode away she 
told him it was fortunate for him that he 
had been so tractable. I think this fierce 
lady must have been agreeable to Oliver's 
grim humour. 

The approach to Ripon is pretty, by a 
road shaded with trees. Above the town 
rises the cathedral, massive and stately if 
not superlatively beautiful. Though it is 
not one of our largest cathedrals, its history 
is immense. 

Even St. Wilfrid's seventh-century church 



THE DALES 35 

was not the first that stood here, for before 
his remote day Eata had founded a monas- 
tery that was hardly built before the Danes 
burnt it. Indeed, the monastery was de- 
stroyed so often — by Danes, Anglo-Saxons, 
Normans, and Scots in turn — that every 
style of architecture, from Saxon to Per- 
pendicular, is represented in the various 
restorations. There are even, I believe, in 
the crypt and chapter-house, fragments of 
Wilfrid's own church, among them being 
the curious slit called Wilfrid's Needle, 
which has been " mighty famous," as 
Camden said, for a great many centuries. 
The saint himself was mighty famous in 
his day, as he well deserved to be. Even 
still we know a good deal about him, 
through Bede and others : how, when he 
was a poor and ignorant boy of fourteen, 
" not enduring the f rowardness of his step- 
mother, he went to seek his fortune," and 
was brought to the notice of Queen Ean- 
fled, " whom for his wit and beauty he was 
not unfit to serve " ; and how she sent him 
to Lindisfarne, where, " being of an acute 
understanding, he in a very short time 



36 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

learnt the psalms and some books " ; and 
how he refused a wife in France ; and was 
presented by King Alfrid of Deira with a 
monastery at Rhypum, here on this very 
hill ; and was consecrated at Compiegne in 
a golden chair carried by singing bishops ; 
and how he converted the people of Bosham 
by teaching them to fish with eel-nets, so 
that " they began more readily at his preach- 
ing to hope for heavenly goods " ; and how 
he won the day in the great controversy 
at Whitby, and finally died as an arch- 
bishop and was buried at the south end of 
the altar here at Ripon. He was a very 
human saint, and much beloved. His church 
was destroyed by Edred, but his monastery 
grew in power. The most beautiful part of 
the present building is the Early English 
west front, which dates from the reign of 
Henry III. 

Ripon is altogether charming, and still 
does homage very prettily to its patron, 
King Alfred, who made it a royal borough. 
He it was who ordained that every night 
a horn should be blown by the wakeman, 
and that any one who was robbed between 



THE DALES 37 

the blowing of the horn and the hour of 
sunrise should be repaid by the townsfolk. 
From his day to ours each night at nine 
o'clock the men of Ripon have heard the 
horn — three long, penetrating blasts before 
the town hall and three before the wake- 
man's house. Several centuries ago the 
wakeman became the mayor, and now he 
blows the horn by deputy. " Except ye 
Lord keep ye Cittie," are the words on the 
town hall, " ye wakeman waketh in vain " ; 
and not far away, at one corner of the 
market-square, is a pretty old gabled house 
bearing this legend : " 1604. In thys house 
lived a long time Hugh Ripley, ye last 
Wakeman and first Mayore of Rippon." 

Yet it is not these links with the begin- 
nings of our history, with Wilfrid the 
Saxon saint and Alfred the Saxon king, 
that draw so many people to Ripon. 
Ripon has a greater attraction than these. 
Only a few miles away is Fountains Abbey. 

When approaching Fountains the motorist 
may feel very thankful that a few additional 
miles on the road are of little importance 
to him. By choosing the longer way, 



38 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

through the village of Studley Royal, he will 
certainly save himself a considerable walk 
and may possibly secure the unspeakable 
blessing of solitude. The walk through the 
park from the main entrance is, I know, re- 
garded as one of the chief beauties of the 
place, with its Temple of Fame, and its Sur- 
prise View, and its little cascades ; but except 
for the view of the Abbey, which is lovely, 
these artificial prettinesses are more appre- 
ciated by those who come forth on "an ex- 
pedition " than by those who really wish to 
seize and keep something of the spirit of the 
place. The distant abbey seen from the east 
is part of a beautiful landscape, a satisfac- 
tion to the eye, a picturesque incident in 
the long glade ; but those who approach it 
from the west come upon it suddenly in all 
its vastness, close at hand, and realise, prob- 
ably for the first time, something of the 
splendour of the old monasteries. 

Here — in this long line of doorways, in 
this enormous church which the choir of 
birds still fills with sacred music, this 
cloister-garth and chapter-house with the 
rich archways, these stairs and domestic 




THK NAYK. KOL'NTAINS ABBEY. 



THE DALES 39 

buildings, wall beyond wall and room 
beyond room — here truly was a power to 
make a monarch jealous ! It is no wonder 
that Yorkshire, crowded as it was with 
monasteries, thought a strength like theirs 
might pit itself against the strength of the 
king, and rose in protest against the Dis- 
solution ; it is no wonder that the king's 
agents could not find enough chains in the 
country to hang the prisoners in. If this 
vast skeleton is so magnificent, of what sort 
was the actual life ! Close your eyes for a 
moment to it all, and think of the begin- 
nings of it. 

Think of those thirteen monks, Prior 
Richard and his brethren from St. Mary's 
at York, hungering for a more perfect ful- 
filment of their vows, who came here long 
ago, when this green sward was " over- 
grown with wood and brambles, more 
proper for a retreat of wild beasts than 
for the human species." Like wild beasts 
they lived, with no shelter but the trees 
and no food but herbs and leaves. They 
worked with their hands by day, and kept 
their vigils by night, " but of sadness or of 



40 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

murmuring there was not one sound," says 
the monk who wrote their story, "but 
every man blessed God with gladness." 
They lived under the thatched yews till 
they had raised a roof for themselves, but 
even when that was accomplished they 
were often on the point of starvation. 
One day when all the food they had was 
two loaves and a half, a beggar asked for 
bread. " One loaf for the beggar," was Abbot 
Richard's decree, "and one and a half for 
the builders. For ourselves God will pro- 
vide." The cartload of bread which arrived 
immediately afterwards as a gift from a 
pious knight was the cause of much thank- 
fulness among the monks, but of little 
surprise. 

As the years passed, lands and legacies 
made the monastery rich. And so at last 
this splendid fabric rose — a triumph of the 
spirit over circumstances, a monument to 
those long-buried monks whose toils and 
sufferings are built into the mighty nave, 
though surely they never dreamed of such 
power and wealth as we are forced to 
dream of as we stand amid this mass of 




THE TOWKII, FOUNTAINS ABBEY, 



THE DALES 41 

broken walls, now green with moss and 
weeds, but once the heart of a huge organ- 
ism. It is a monument, too, to many who 
came after the brave thirteen : to Abbot 
Huby, who built the tower and is said to be 
buried near it ; to John of Kent, who gave 
us the bewildering beauty of the Chapel of 
the Nine Altars, one of the most exquisite 
things ever wrought in stone : so spiritual, 
so aspiring, that it seems to be a prayer 
made visible, or even — with its slender 
arrowy columns rising into the air till, like 
fountains, they break into curves — to be the 
embodiment of the abbey motto : Benedicite 
Fontes Domino. 

And while we are remembering those who 
laboured for Fountains, do not let us forget 
the man who died for it at Tyburn — William 
Thirsk. This abbot was rash enough to 
resist the messengers of Privy Seal, and was 
accused by them of many things. He had, 
they wrote, " gretly dilapidate his howse " by 
theft and sacrilege, had sold the plate and 
jewels of the abbey, and had not even secured 
a proper price for them. To those who were 
themselves bent upon theft and sacrilege on 



42 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

a large scale this last offence seemed worst 
of all. He had actually, they declared con- 
temptuously, been persuaded by a jeweller 
that a valuable ruby was a mere garnet; 
"for the trewith ys he is a varra fole 
and a miserable ideote." He joined in that 
desperate protest the Pilgrimage of Grace, 
and so was hanged. 

Fortunately for posterity as well as for 
himself, Thirsk's successor, Brodelay, who 
was a creature of Thomas Cromwell and 
chosen with a view to future events, was 
not a " varra fole," and yielded meekly 
when his abbey was demanded of him, 
saving it from the fate of Jervaulx. As 
it is, too much of it is gone — much that 
might have been preserved. The cloisters 
have vanished though the garth is there, 
with the long flight of steps and the great 
stone basin in the grass and the yew-tree 
beside it ; and gone, too, is the magnificent 
infirmary, deliberately destroyed in the days 
of James I. by the vandal who owned it 
and was in want of some building material. 

One thing, however, still stands, which is, 
perhaps, the last relic of the monks of 



THE DALES 43 

Fountains that we should expect to find, 
and is certainly the most touching relic 
possible — actually linking us with those 
far-off days when the patient thirteen were 
left here in the wilderness by Archbishop 
Thurstan to keep their vow of poverty 
with such terrible literalness. Over there, 
beside the wall, is one of the yew-trees 
whose boughs, covered with thatch, formed 
the first monastery of Fountains. 

Close to the western entrance is Fountains 
Hall. Surely we must forgive that wicked 
man who pulled down the infirmary, since 
the place he built with the stones is this 
lovely Jacobean house, a thing as beautiful 
in its own domestic way as time-worn stone 
and bays and mullions can make it. A balus- 
trade, a sundial, an old-fashioned garden and 
ancient yew-hedge make the picture and our 
pleasure complete. 

There is a comfortable hotel at Ripon, and 
as we have a great deal to see before reaching 
any other desirable shelter, we shall find it 
best, I think, to spend a night there either 
before or after visiting Fountains. From the 
windows of the Unicorn, on market-day, the 



44 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

paved square is a gay and pleasant sight, with 
its crowded stalls and bright awnings, and 
stores of fruit and flowers and basket-work ; 
and here on a summer's night the horn- 
blower may be dimly seen at nine o'clock 
in his three-cornered hat and laced coat, 
doing the bidding of Alfred the Great. 

From Ripon there are three ways of reach- 
ing Richmond, without taking into account 
the direct route, which would show us 
nothing of the dales we came out to see. 
In either case we must go by Jervaulx 
and Middleham and Wensley. 

Only a few miles from Ripon is a village 
less famous, but not less attractive, than any 
of these : a spot well-known to antiquarians, 
and doubtless to artists too, but unfamiliar 
to ordinary folk. The charm of West Tanfield 
catches the eye at once from the bridge that 
spans the Ure, and comes as a pleasant sur- 
prise in the midst of rather tame scenery. 
The red-roofed cottages are grouped upon the 
river-bank, with gay little gardens sloping to 
the water's edge ; behind them rises the 
church tower, and the square grey gatehouse 
of the Marmions. with its delicate oriel. This 



THE DALES 45 

gateway was built by Henry V.'s friend and 
executor FitzHugh, who married one of the 
Marmions and lived here, and added to the 
church that held the splendid tombs of his 
wife's ancestors. He was not buried here 
himself, but by his own wish with curious 
haste at Jervaulx. It is seldom that a little 
village church possesses such monuments as 
these of the Marmions, so rich in ornament 
and so marvellously preserved : the arched 
and canopied recess that holds the effigy of 
Sir John ; the cloaked and coronetted figure 
of Maud his wife, who built this aisle and 
founded chantries here ; the emblazoned tomb 
of the unknown lady with the lion ; the 
knight in mail ; and the magnificent monu- 
ment of that other knight and his wife which 
is probably a cenotaph in memory of John 
and Elizabeth Marmion of the fourteenth 
century. Their effigies lie, perfectly pre- 
served, under a light and graceful " hearse " 
of ironwork, with seven sconces for candles — 
the only iron hearse, they say, in England. 
Every detail of the dress, every line of the 
features, is distinct. The knight's aquiline 
nose and full lips, rather sweet in expression, 



46 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

are encircled by a gorget of mail, over whose 
delicate links droop the ends of his long 
moustache. A collar of SS clasps his throat. 

On the north side of the chancel there is a 
curious recess, with a squint into the nave 
and two little windows into the choir. It is 
unique, I believe, and as regards its origin 
and uses very baffling. 

Beyond "West Tanfield the scenery grows in 
beauty, for we are Hearing the hills. Masham 
lies prettily in a valley, with a setting of 
moors and dales, gold and emerald when the 
sun is shining, soft grey and green when the 
day is dull. Skirting the little town we go 
on our way to Jervaulx. 

The site of Jervaulx is not beautiful, but 
pleasant and peaceful. It lies in a private 
park, so the car must wait beside the 
gardener's cottage while we walk, borrowed 
key in hand, across the field to the scattered 
fragments of what was once a great Cistercian 
abbey. Of the ruins tragically little was left 
standing by the energetic commissioners of 
Henry VIII., though they apologised for some 
necessary delay in their congenial work. 
" Pleasythe your lordship to be advertysed," 



THE DALES 47 

wrote Thomas Cromwell's " most bounden 
beadman " Richard Bellyseys, " I have taken 
down all the lead of Jervaux . . . and the 
said lead cannot be conveit nor carried until 
the next sommre, for the ways in that countre 
are so foul and deep that no caryage can pass 
in wyntre. And as concerninge the taking 
down of the house I am minded to let it stand 
to the next spring of the year, by reason of 
the days are now so short it wolde be double 
charges to do it now." The work was finished 
with great thoroughness at last, however, as 
all may see. Of the church the barest outline 
only is left, with the raised platform where 
once the high altar stood, and near it the 
broken figure that is said to represent the 
Henry FitzHugh who did so much for West 
Tanfield and left such strange orders about 
his funeral. He desired to be buried at 
Jervaulx with all possible haste after his 
death. " To be carried thither by daylight, 
if it come not too late ; but if so, then the 
same night." The land on which this com- 
munity first settled, at Fors, was the gift 
of one of FitzHugh's ancestors, which may 
account for his wish to be buried here. 



48 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

The case of the last abbot of Jervaulx, 
Adam Sedbergh, was a sad one ; for he 
suffered the pains of martyrdom without 
its exaltation, and while certainly failing to 
please himself, pleased no one else. He was 
a timid creature, apparently, and when York- 
shire rose in the Pilgrimage of Grace, he was 
so much afraid of king and rebels alike that 
he simply ran away and hid. The rebel mob 
came clamouring about the gates of Jervaulx, 
crying : " Choose you a new abbot ! " and 
the frightened brothers gathered hurriedly 
in the chapter-house. If we follow this 
path, and turn down by these crumbling 
steps, we may stand where they stood that 
day; for there is more of the chapter- 
house still in existence than of any other 
part of the building. The roof that covered 
the monks' bewildered heads is gone ; but 
here is the wide stone bench on which 
they sat, trembling, through that hasty 
conclave, and here are the columns and 
the walls on which their eyes dwelt, 
unseeingly, while the rebels threatened 
them with fire at their gates and their 
rightful leader was hiding in the heather. 



THE DALES 49 

They could think of no better course 
than to seek the reluctant Adam, and 
make a rebel of him whether he would 
or no. They found him on the moors at 
last, and lest his beautiful abbey should 
be burnt to the ground because of him, 
he came back to face the curses and 
daggers of the mob, the futile sufferings 
of rebellion, the prison-cell in the Tower 
where his name still shows upon the 
wall, and the gallows of Tyburn. His 
tardy and unwilling heroism was piteously 
useless, for not even the flames of the 
Pilgrims of Grace could have laid the 
walls of Jervaulx lower or left its altars 
more desolate than did the hammers and 
picks of the king's agents. 

Charles Kingsley came here once, and picked 
a forget - me - not for his wife — a pleasant 
memory among so many fierce ones. He was 
the last canon of the collegiate church of 
Middleham, where he stayed for several days 
at the time of his instalment, and endured 
" so much bustle, and robing and unrobing " 
that he had no time to think. Middleham, 
as a rule, is anything but a bustling place ; 
5 



50 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

but in spite of its demure looks, I believe 
there are still days when its streets are, 
as Kingsley saw them, " crowded with 
jockeys and grooms." We are now on 
our way thither. After passing through 
East Witton we cross the Cover, whose 
pools are dear to fishermen, and were 
therefore dear to Kingsley. "Little Cover," 
he called it affectionately, "in his deep 
wooded glen, with his yellow rock and 
bright white stones, and brown water 
clearer than crystal." 

We climb into Middleham past the base of 
an old cross on which is fixed a modern head. 
At the top of the hill is the curious structure 
called the Swine Cross, with the mutilated 
stone beast whose identity has proved so hard 
to establish. Some say it is the Bear of 
Warwick ; others recognise in it the Boar of 
Gloucester. As far as its personal appear- 
ance is concerned it might with equal 
plausibility be called the Lion of England 
or the Hound of the Baskervilles, seeing that 
its outline commits the sculptor to nothing 
and it has no manner of face whatever. 
Turning to the left we find the castle look- 
ing down upon us gloomily. 



THE DALES 51 

This castle of Middleham is square and 
stern ; more strong than beautiful. Its 
keep is Norman, and is the work of a 
Fitzranulph of the twelfth century ; but the 
towered wall that hems it round so closely 
was built by the Nevilles, who lived here 
for many years in princely state. The 
great Earl of Warwick, when he was not 
making kings — and, indeed, sometimes when 
he was — chose this to be a centre of his 
pomp and power ; and one of the kings he 
made, Edward IV., is said to have been 
imprisoned here for a short time. The time 
would have been longer if Edward had not 
cajoled his custodian, the Archbishop of 
York, into allowing him to hunt in the 
park. We know from Henry VI. how 
Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and Lord 
Hastings lay in ambush in the forest that 
is no longer here, and rescued Edward from 
those who were hunting with him. 

That same Duke of Gloucester, who was 
a trespasser on this occasion, came to 
Middleham as its master later on. Poor 
Anne Neville, the kingmaker's daughter, 
spent most of her sad married life within 



52 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

this melancholy fortress, with the husband 
who asked no man to make him king, but 
made himself Richard III. We may see the 
gloomy walls of her withdrawing room — 
bereft now of both roof and floor — where 
she sat so often sick at heart and ailing ; 
and the banquet-hall where her father kept 
such state ; and the kitchen where six oxen 
were sometimes roasted for one breakfast. 
There, in the north wall, is the gateway 
through which she watched her husband 
riding out to entrap his little nephews, and 
through which she herself soon followed 
him to see him crowned ; and here at the 
south-west corner of the outer wall is the 
tower where her only son was born. The 
boy spent practically all his short life here, 
all but that brief and brilliant interlude 
of the coronation at Westminster and the 
pageantry at York ; and here, too, he died 
in his parents' absence. I do not know if 
Anne ever returned to Middleham. We 
hear of her " in a state bordering on mad- 
ness," and not long afterwards her tragic 
life was over. 

For many years the castle was left at the 



THE DALES 53 

mercy of all who cared to despoil it. It 
was very literally treated as a quarry ; for 
when all the faced stone within reach had 
been removed the walls were hollowed out 
below, in the hope that the upper part 
might fall and so provide more plunder. 
Such is the cohesion of the masonry, how- 
ever, that this design was more or less 
frustrated, and the undermined walls still 
stand like overhanging cliffs. Here and 
there, indeed, great masses have fallen in 
huge boulders as solid as rock ; but perhaps 
the gunpowder of the Commonwealth was 
responsible for these. 

There was once a suggestion made, in a 
letter from Lord Huntingdon to his " verrye 
good lord ye lord Treasurer," that Queen 
Elizabeth should join in this work of 
quarrying. She purposed to pay a visit to 
her city of York, a visit which was designed 
to be " no small comforte to all hyr 
good subjects, and no less terrour to ye 
others." But the great difficulty was to 
find " a good housse " for her. Huntingdon 
excitedly laid his scheme before Burleigh. 
"Ye meanes ys thys," he wrote. "Hyr 



54 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

hyghness hathe heare ye Castell of Midham, 
which ys in greate ruyne and daylye 
wasteth, . . . but ye tymber ye stone ye 
lead and ye iron yt ys theare wold make 
a fayre housse heare, and as I gesse with 
good husbandrye paye all ye chargys. I am 
sure if your L. dyd see ye place . . . you 
wolde thinke yt most convenient to be 
pulled downe, rathyr than yt shuld stande 
and waste daylye as yt dothe."* Fortu- 
nately Burleigh did not think it most con- 
venient, and now the place no longer wastes 
daily, but is daily being repaired. 

When we crossed Cover Bridge we entered 
Wensleydale, and a mile or two beyond 
Middleham is the pretty little town from 
which the dale takes its name. The scenery 
is quiet and pastoral here, the Ure flows 
smoothly, and it is difficult to realise how 
near we are to the sort of country Defoe 
was thinking of when he wrote in 
his eighteenth-century way : " The black 
moorish lands show dismal and frightful." 
How near we are to the moorish lands, 
however, we shall shortly find out, and it 
* Quoted by Speight. 



THE DALES 55 

is at Wensley that we have to decide by 
which road we shall cross them. 

But first, here is Wensley Church on the 
left, with Saxon stones in it, and a splendid 
brass that no one who cares for such things 
would wish to pass by, and among its 
graves one that has been thought to be of 
interest to every British man and woman. 
It is an altar-tomb with fluted corners 
standing on the right of the path that leads 
from gate to porch. Beneath it lies Peter 
Goldsmith. It has been stated,* on what 
grounds I cannot discover, that he was 
surgeon of the Victory at Trafalgar, and 
that Nelson died in his arms. This is 
making a great claim for him. Yet his 
name is not mentioned in the standard 
accounts of Nelson's death,! nor does it 
appear in the list of the Victory's officers. 
As we all know, Beatty was the surgeon 
who attended Nelson in the cockpit. The 
assistant-surgeon was Neil Smith ; the 
surgeon's mate was Westerburgh. J 

* Speight's " Koiiiantic Richrnondshire." 
| See " Nelson's Despatches," vol. vii. 
| " The Trafalgar Roll," by Col. R. M. Holden, in the 
United Service Magazine, for October, 1908. 



56 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

This is the country of the Scropes of 
Bolton, and their names and arms are con- 
spicuous in the church — over the porch, on 
the buttresses, on the carved chancel stalls, 
and, above all, on Lord Bolton's screened 
pew in the north aisle. The carved sides of 
this were originally part of the parclose 
by which the tombs of the Scropes were 
surrounded in Easby Abbey. The front of 
it is ugly and has an eighteenth-century 
air. The horrible grey marbled paint that 
defaces the woodwork suggests the nine- 
teenth. The famous brass, which lies within 
the communion rails, is so beautiful as to 
appeal to the most ignorant in such matters, 
and dates from the fourteenth century. It 
marks the grave of two men — Sir Simon 
of Wensley, priest, and the seventeenth- 
century rector who desired to be buried 
under the same stone and brass. 

Our course, after leaving Wensley, depends 
on our further intentions. The course I 
recommend is this : to drive up Wensley- 
dale on the lower road, past the cascades 
and village of Aysgarth — named by the 
Danes Asgard, the home of the gods — past 



THE DALES 57 

Bainbridge and Hawes ; to cross the river 
at Yorebridge, and return by Askrigg and 
Redmire, making a short digression to 
Bolton Castle ; then, turning to the left 
beyond Redmire, to strike across the 
"moorish lands" to Richmond. These York- 
shire moors, which seemed so " ill-looking " 
to Defoe, are neither black nor frightful 
in our later eyes, but glorious with colour 
and light. The old road from Leyburn 
across Barden and Hipswell Moors has 
rather a bad surface, and a hill that is stiff 
enough to account for the making of the 
new road; but on a sunny summer's evening 
the view from the highest point is lovely 
beyond words. Beautiful it must be at all 
seasons and in all weathers, but it is only 
when the air is clear that the head of 
Swaledale may be seen on one side of the 
ridge and the far-away slopes of Wensley- 
dale on the other, and it is only when the 
sun is sinking that those distant hills are 
washed with gold. The moors sweep round 
us far and near ; a line of dark firs crosses 
them mid- way ; patches of vivid green 
break through the heather; and down in 



58 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

the valley the Swale shows as a thin thread 
of twisted silver. Behind us, towards 
Middleham, the more level country is a 
dark blue streak beyond the crimson of the 
sunlit heather. The white road, straight 
and narrow, lies before us. 

Those who choose this way will have 
little to regret, and will have one real 
advantage : they will approach Richmond 
by the road which gives the finest view of 
that fair town. They must remember, how- 
ever, that there is a very steep downward 
gradient at one point between the moors 
and the river, and at the bottom of it a 
sharp turn over a bridge. The run up 
Swaledale may easily be achieved from 
Richmond, where there is a comfortable 
hotel. 

The other alternative is to cross from 
Wensleydale to Swaledale by way of the 
Buttertubs Pass. Now, I do not wish to be 
too encouraging about this pass ! It is a 
place for the well-equipped only, and for 
those who do not suffer too much when 
their tyres are suffering. Many cars, of 
course, have passed this way, and many 



THE DALES 59 

more will do so ; but none the less it is not 
a suitable road for motoring. It is preci- 
pitous in places, narrow everywhere, and 
the surface is almost entirely composed of 
loose stones. Moreover, a grassy slope, so 
steep as to be almost a precipice, drops 
away from the edge of it ; and though I 
am assured the pass is perfectly safe, there 
are points in it where nothing but faith in 
one's driver can make it comfortable ! The 
scenery is magnificent. 

Starting from Wensley, we must take the 
upper of the two roads to Redmire marked on 
Bartholomew's map, for the lower one, appar- 
ently, runs through Lord Bolton's park. It 
occurs to one here, as in several other places 
in Yorkshire, that it would be a good plan 
if map-makers would adopt some distinctive 
way of marking private roads. The views 
from the high ground are lovely. All Wens- 
leydale lies before us — green as an emerald 
in the valley, bare and grey on the hilltops, 
dimly blue in the distance. Over it all lies 
that haze of luminous gold that the sunshine 
gives to these dales. Far away, but clearly 
visible, Bolton Castle stands up on the hill- 



60 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

side, massive and grey and relentless, a 
queen's prison. At Redmire Station we turn 
aside to see it. 

" The castelle," says Leland, " as no great 
howse, is al compactid in 4 or 5 towers." 
Outwardly, it is probably much the same as 
in his day : a square of cold, grey stone with 
a tower at each corner, gloomy and forbidding, 
with no attempt at ornament, no break in the 
solid masonry except the tiny windows. To 
Leland it was simply the castle of the Scropes, 
the work of the famous Chancellor who 
fought at Crecy in his younger days, the 
fortress of a family that was perpetually 
distinguishing itself. So he looked at it and 
passed it by. It was " no great howse." 
But we see it with other eyes, because it has 
been touched by the charm that wins us in 
spite of our better judgment, just as it won 
men long ago in spite of theirs — the glamour 
of the Queen of Scots. The banquet hall 
where so many Scropes have feasted — bishops, 
statesmen, judges, Knights of the Garter — 
leaves us cold ; we do not care to know 
there was a chantry here ; even the cruel 
dungeon in the ground, with the hole through 




: 




THE DALES 61 

which the victim was lowered and the bolt 
to which he was fastened and the slab of 
stone that was fixed over the top, only 
calls for a passing shudder. To us the 
interest of Bolton Castle is centred in the 
white-washed room upstairs. 

It was a summer evening, " one hour after 
sunsetting," when Mary rode into that grass- 
grown court with Sir Francis Knollys and 
Sir George Bowes, and two companies of 
soldiers, and six ladies, and forty -three 
horses, and four cartloads of luggage. She 
was not yet very unhappy. " She hath been 
very quiet," wrote Knollys of the journey, 
"very tractable, and void of displeasant 
countenance." She was less tractable when 
the time came for her to leave Bolton : she 
had learnt much meanwhile. For the months 
spent at Bolton were the crisis of her mis- 
fortunes. In this upper room she sat 
"knitting of a work" in the deep recess of 
the window, or writing endless letters by 
the fire, or turning young Christopher 
Norton's head, while the Casket Letters 
were being read at Hampton Court, and 
her accusers were discussing her character 



62 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

at York, and her "dear cousin and 
sister" was pressing her to abdicate her 
throne. It was in this room that she wrote 
at last to her advisers : " I pray you do 
not speak to me again about abdication, 
for I am deliberately resolved rather 
to die than to resign my crown ; and 
the last words that I shall utter in my 
life shall be the words of a Queen of 
Scotland." 

She wrote a vast number of other letters 
here. Some were to the young Queen of 
Spain, her sister-in-law, who, as Elizabeth 
of France, had been her playmate at the 
Court of Henri II. ; some were about the 
care of her infant son; and some, of a con- 
ciliatory kind, were to the Queen of England. 
" Toutesfoyes," she wrote, " sur votre parolle 
il n'est rien que je n'entreprisse, car je ne 
doutay jamays de votre honneur et royalle 
fidelitay." 

It was here, too, that she wrote her first 
English letter to her custodian, Sir Francis 
Knollys — her schoolmaster, as she called him, 
who had been giving her lessons, apparently 
without any marked success. 



THE DALES 63 

"It is sed Seterday my unf rinds wil be wth 
zou ; y sey nething, bot trest weil. An ze 
send one to zour wiff ze may asur her schu 
wold a bin weilcom to a pur strenger. . . . 
Thus affter my commendations I pray God 
heue you in his kipin. 

" Your assured gud frind, 

"Marie R. 
" Excus ivel vreitn furst tym." 

Mary's rooms have lately been restored ; 
but this plain stone fireplace is the same by 
which she sat shivering while the news of 
the Westminster Conference was so long in 
coming through the snow, hoping against 
hope that the English Queen would not 
" make her lose all " ; turning over in her 
mind the scheme for marrying her to Don 
John of Austria ; reading specious letters 
from Elizabeth pleading " the natural love of 
a mother towards her bairn " ; and smiling 
upon Knollys till he credited her with " an 
eloquent tongue, a discreet head, a stout 
courage, and a liberal heart adjoined there- 
unto." This is the window through which 
she looked out over Wensleydale, luminous 



64 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

in the August sunshine or white with snow, 
and realised gradually that she was indeed 
a prisoner, she who "loved greatly to go on 
horseback." She was allowed to ride in the 
park, it is true ; but her riding was a 
mockery with twelve soldiers at her horse's 
heels. 

Yet she was not always sad. She had 
her lighter moments and pastimes other than 
knitting. "The Queen here is merry, and 
hunteth," wrote Knollys, " and passeth 
her time in pleasant manner." She even 
coquetted with the Reformed Faith, and 
" grew into a good liking of the Liturgy " ; 
and she took pleasure (of a more convincing 
kind) in having her hair busked by Mistress 
Mary Seaton, whom she declared to be the 
finest busker in any country. Knollys, appa- 
rently, was not insensible to the charms of 
a coiffure. " This day she did set such a 
curled hair upon the Queen that it was like 
to be a periwig that showed very delicately ; 
and every other day she hath a new device 
of hairdressing, without any cost, and yet 
setteth forth a woman gaily well." 

Here, up these steps upon which Mary's 



THE DALES 65 

skirts have trailed, is the room where Mistress 
Seaton set such a curled hair upon the lovely 
head, the room where the Queen slept, or 
more often lay awake. There had been some 
difficulty in making her rooms ready to receive 
her. The Scropes were not luxurious, it 
seems. Her bedding and hangings came 
from Sir George Bowes' house, near Barnard 
Castle; pewter vessels and a copper kettle 
were hastily borrowed from the Court of 
England ; and the neighbours lent some 
furniture with rather a bad grace. There 
is a very strong local tradition that Mary 
once escaped from Bolton Castle. The 
" Queen's Gap " on Leyburn Shawl is pointed 
out as the scene of her recapture, and this 
little bedroom window as the way of her 
escape. I cannot find the least evidence that 
the story is true. But it was in this room 
that she lay sick for days, before she was 
dragged reluctantly away in the dusk of 
a January dawn, bitterly cold and bitterly 
angry, to her next prison at Tutbury. 

This castle held for the king in the Civil 
War, and that is why it has lost its north- 
west tower. The actual fall was in a 
6 



66 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

storm, a hundred years later than the 
siege that weakened the masonry. 

As we drive away up Wensleydale we 
look back again and again at the fortress, 
which dominates the valley far more con- 
spicuously than its position on the green 
hillside seems to warrant. The scenery 
grows wilder and the slopes nearer before 
a steep descent with a bad surface takes 
us into Askrigg. Here, in a little open 
space beside the church, is a picturesque 
Jacobean house of grey stone, bearing an 
inscription and the date mdclxxviii. Its 
projecting bays are joined by a wooden 
gallery, which was designed, it is said, to 
give a good view of the bull-baiting that 
took place before it. There, hidden in the 
grass, is the iron ring to which the bull 
was tied ; and close beside it stands the 
restored village-cross — a strange conjunc- 
tion of symbols ! In the fifteenth-century 
church there are some pillars which are 
thought to have been transported from 
Fors, the original dwelling, about a mile 
from here, of the brothers of Jervaulx — 
the little band of monks from Savigny, 



THE DALES 67 

who came to this valley under the leader- 
ship of Peter de Quincy, the Leech, in the 
reign of Stephen. They found this place 
too wild even for their Cistercian ideals, 
too cold and foggy for the ripening of 
crops, too frequently beset by wolves ; and 
so, though the optimistic Peter was " very 
certain we shall be able to raise a com- 
petent supply of ale, cheese, bread, and 
butter," the community moved nearer to 
civilisation, leaving behind them nothing 
for us to see except a window in a barn 
and these pillars in Askrigg Church. 

As the road becomes narrower and 
rougher the scenery every moment grows 
more beautiful. Hawes lies on the other 
side of the valley at the foot of the blue 
hills, in a lovely position beside the Ure ; 
and when we have reached a point exactly 
opposite to it we turn sharply up a steep 
pitch on the right, with a splendid pano- 
ramic view of mountains on the left as 
we climb. 

This is the beginning of the Buttertubs 
Pass. From this point onwards, till the 
road plunges down into Swaledale, the 



68 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

surface is composed more or less of loose 
stones. The stiff est upward gradients we 
shall have to encounter are within a mile 
or two of this spot, for the wild part of 
the pass — the real moorland — is compara- 
tively level, and by the time we reach the 
actual Buttertubs we are already running 
down. This is the climax — this point 
where the downward gradient begins — for 
here suddenly the solid earth seems to fall 
away from us : here suddenly the rough 
and narrow road is no longer lying across 
the far-stretching moorland, but is hanging 
high upon the hillside, clinging upon the 
extremest edge of a gulf which drops 
dizzily into a blue sea of shadows. Thus 
it clings for miles. Beyond the chasm the 
bare hillside rises again above our heads 
in magnificent curves, glowing with colour, 
and cleft here and there into purple 
gorges. Slightly above the road on the 
left are the Buttertubs, strange crater-like 
hollows of unplumbed depth, appearing at 
intervals beside us, with sharp rocks brist- 
ling through the grass at their mouths. 
As we slowly descend, the hills of Swale- 



THE DALES 69 

dale rise before us like a wall blocking the 
defile ; and presently a gate across the road 
shows that we are near the world again. 

Truly this is one of the runs that are 
unforgettable. To be among these savage 
heights and depths, these heaving waves of 
desolate moor, to have these solitudes above 
us and these blue shadows so far below us, 
is to know something of " the strong foun- 
dations of the earth." It is with a feeling 
of anti-climax that we close the gate 
behind us, and, on a precipitous gradient 
and no surface worth mentioning, steer 
slowly down into Swaledale. 

As we cautiously make our way over the 
stones of this very trying lane, we are 
confronted with rather a startling notice 
board: "No Road." It seems a little late 
to tell us that now : they might have men- 
tioned it before we crossed the pass ! Then 
it dawns upon us that the amateur hand 
that traced the letters has sloped the board 
in the wrong direction. It is really meant 
to face down the valley, for the discourage- 
ment of those who might stray up from 
Swaledale, ignorant of the pass. 



70 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Swaledale, I think, is the most beautiful 
of all the dales. Of course beauty varies 
with the weather, and distant Muker in the 
hollow of the hills cannot be the same on 
a colourless, grey day as when it lies in a 
pool of sunshine. But on any day Swale- 
dale must seem, to one who is fresh from 
the elemental dignity of the pass, to hold 
a wonderful variety of lovely things : opal 
hills and soft woods, patches of heather 
and slopes of fern, fir-trees and feathery 
birches and clumps of scarlet rowans. There 
are individual pictures that one remembers 
as types of the whole. At Gunnerside, for 
instance, where the road crosses the Swale, 
cliffs rise from the stony river-bed, and are 
crowned with overhanging trees, the banks 
are smothered in masses of burdock leaves, 
and the whole scene is encircled by the 
hills. The road is not very good, and there 
are some steep pitches between Gunnerside 
and Reeth ; but it matters little, for who 
would care to hurry through such a land 
as this? 

It was on the road near Low Row that 
John Wesley began his preaching in this 




^IpT •■ W 



' s 




THE DALES 71 

part of the world, standing on a table by 
the wayside. A little further on is He- 
laugh, once a gayer place than it is at 
present. The hills above it have echoed 
many a time to the winding of the horn, 
when John of Gaunt was lord here and 
went out to chase the boar. Later on 
these lands belonged to that strange Duke 
of Wharton, "the scorn and wonder" of 
Pope's day, who was a Whig when it was 
unfashionable and a Jacobite when it 
became dangerous, who fought against his 
country and died a monk. 

"Ask you why Wharton broke through every rule? 
'Twas all for fear the Knaves should call him Fool." 

At Reeth, a fascinating place built on a 
slope at the mouth of Arkengarth Dale, we 
cross the river again, and find a much 
better road on the other side. 

Between Reeth and Richmond the Swale, 
flowing softly past its richly wooded banks, 
is as beautiful as the lower Wye. On the 
further side of it we see the Norman tower 
of Marrick Priory, where once twelve black- 
robed nuns lived only a mile away from 



72 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

their " white-clothid " sisters of Ellerton. 
The nuns of Marrick were fortunate, for 
though they were so few they won a short 
respite for some unknown reason, and were 
allowed to stay in their beautiful retreat 
till the dissolution of the larger monas- 
teries. There are few places in England, 
I think, that would be easier to love and 
harder to leave than Swaledale. 

Richmond, on its hill, guards the mouth 
of the valley. This first view of it from 
Swaledale, with the tower of the castle 
rising slowly into sight, gives no idea at 
all of the beauty and strength that have 
made it famous. We only know how Rich- 
mond has won its name when we see it 
from below, with the buttressed bridge in 
the foreground, and the bright waters of 
the Swale reflecting the houses that are 
clustered at their brink, and the sun-flecked 
path under the trees, and the roofs, tier 
above tier, climbing the steep hillside, and 
above them all — foe of their foes and 
shelter of their friends — the long curtain- 
wall and towering keep of the castle. This 
view of Richmond has been praised so 



THE DALES 73 

much that one fears disappointment. Yet 
one is not disappointed. Richmond is not 
only beautiful : it has that other quality — 
so much more important than beauty in 
woman or town — the quality of charm. 
Richmond is lovable, 

It was the Normans who first took ad- 
vantage of this fine position for a fortress : 
the Saxon owners of the place were the 
Earls of Mercia, and had no castle here, for 
Gilling, their headquarters in the north, 
was only a few miles away. We may 
dream, if we like, that Ethelfled, the sol- 
dierly daughter of Alfred the Great, and 
Godiva, the Lady of Coventry, visited this 
place when their husbands were minded to 
chase the wolf or the boar in this part of 
their lands. It is possible that they did 
so : but there is no authentic history of 
Richmond before the time when Alan the 
Breton received from his kinsman, William 
the Conqueror, "at the siege before York," 
a grant of " all the towns and lands which 
lately belonged to Earl Edwin in York- 
shire." It was this Alan who began to 
build the castle. We may not enter it 



74 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

without permission, for it is now used as 
barracks ; but we can walk up to the 
gateway at the foot of the great keep and 
see its buttresses and turrets towering 
above us ; and we can follow the path that 
surrounds the walls and look at the view- 
that George IV. admired so much. This 
view of the river from the castle is very- 
pretty, but is by no means comparable to 
the view of the castle from the river. 
Possibly George IV. fixed his eyes upon the 
Culloden Tower among the trees to the right, 
and was biassed by association. 

Three times this castle wall behind us 
has imprisoned a king. When five English 
knights and their men-at-arms made their 
dashing march to Alnwick and captured 
William the Lion of Scotland, it was to 
Richmond they brought him; and David 
Bruce, another Scottish king, was here 
nearly two hundred years later ; and the 
third was Charles I. Legend, indeed, tells 
us of a fourth king still imprisoned here; 
for this castle rock is one of the many 
places wherein King Arthur lies asleep with 
all his knights, awaiting the magic blast 



THE DALES 75 

upon the horn that shall some day wake 
him. The Breton folk say he waits beneath 
the island of Agalon ; the Welsh look for 
him to come forth from among the moun- 
tains of Glamorganshire. 

Soon after Bruce's imprisonment the castle 
seems to have fallen into disrepair ; and 
this, I suppose, was the reason that John 
of Gaunt, who was Lord of Richmond, made 
his hunting expeditions from Helaugh 
rather than from here. Harry of Rich- 
mond, when he became Henry VII., gave 
this castle of his to his mother, and finding 
that the " man till wall " was " in decay of 
maisone wark," and " all the doyers, wyndoys, 
and other necessaries," with much beside, 
were also in decay, he gave orders that 
the whole should " be new refresshede." 

Though this attractive town possesses 
much, it has also lost much. Once it had 
a wall — built to keep the Scots out — and 
several gates ; but all are gone now, except 
the postern in Friar's Wynd, and the old 
pointed arch of Bargate, which we may see 
from the foot of Carnforth Hill. Gone, too, 
is the elaborate cross, which, according to 



76 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

all accounts, was an object of beauty in 
the paved market-place. This is more than 
can be said for the strange obelisk that has 
supplanted it. But in this same market- 
square still stands Holy Trinity Chapel — 
not beautiful, but very ancient, being that 
" chapel in Richemont toune " which, Leland 
says, had " straung figures in the waulles of 
it. The people there dreme," he goes on, 
"that it was ons a temple of idoles." Some 
even dream that this chapel was founded 
by Paulinus, the seventh-century saint, in 
memory of an occasion when he baptized 
an enormous number of converts in the 
Swale ; but, as Bede says the ceremony took 
place in the river because it was impossible 
to build oratories "in those parts," this 
dream is not very credible. It is no dream, 
I believe, but a fact, that the chapel stands 
on the site of a Danish temple. In its 
walls there are now no strange figures of 
" idoles," but some very strange annexes for 
a chapel. A butcher's shop is wedged 
between the tower and the nave, and 
several other shops are built into its side. 
One of the most notable things here is 



THE DALES 77 

the Grey Friars' Tower, which we passed 
on entering the town from Swaledale : a 
peculiarly slender and graceful piece of 
Perpendicular work. Like the campanile 
at Evesham, it stands alone because the 
building of the church connected with it 
was suddenly brought to an end by the 
Dissolution. The Franciscans who had their 
friary here were mostly put to death or 
imprisoned for life — yet not for long — 
because they thought it their duty to obey 
St. Francis rather than Henry VIII. 

There are remains of another religious 
house quite close to Richmond. Very little 
is left at Easby of the abbey church of 
St. Agatha, but the position of the ruins 
beside the river is full of quiet charm. 
Those who dwelt here were Premonstra- 
tensian Canons, whose rather confusing 
order was founded by the German visionary 
St. Norbert, and whose white garments 
were chosen for them by the Virgin her- 
self. They passed to their dormitory 
through the Norman archway with the 
ornamented mouldings, the last remaining 
fragment of the original twelfth-century 



78 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

building raised by Roald, the Constable of 
Richmond. Until lately a very decorative 
tree grew up through this archway and 
figured in every picture of Easby, but it 
threatened to break down the masonry, and 
so was sacrificed. It is a sad loss to artists. 
But the last memorial of Roald would have 
been a loss still sadder, for, even as it is, 
Roald is often forgotten in favour of the 
Scropes, who practically rebuilt St. Agatha's. 
Their shield is still over the porch of the 
parish church, a hundred yards away ; their 
dust lies under the rough sods to the west of 
the north transept. At Wensley we saw the 
carved sides of what was once their par- 
close. 

We finally leave the town by the same 
road that leads to Easby, turning off to the 
left to join the great Roman highway beyond 
Gilling. It was just here, where the roads 
fork, that the Lass of Richmond Hill lived 
in the eighteenth century, till she married the 
writer of the song ; and hither, too, to the 
same Hill House, came later songs, greater 
than MacNally's — songs from Byron to his 
future wife, Miss Milbank. Our last view of 



THE DALES 79 

Richmond, from Maison Dieu, is worthy of 
remembrance. The town is spread before us 
with all its towers ; the slender Grey Friars' 
Tower, the church, the soaring keep ; and in 
the background of hills is the green gap that 
means so much to those who have lost their 
hearts to Swaledale. That is behind us now ; 
and on the right is stretched the great green 
plain of central Yorkshire — the plain that 
divides the western moors from the moors 
of Clevedon and Hambledon. Somewhere 
in that plain is the Great North Road. 

Soon after passing Lord Zetland's place, 
Aske Hall, we drive through the wide street 
of Gilling, the little village of gardens, where 
there is nothing left, except a few Saxon 
stones, to remind us that the great Earls of 
Mercia made it one of their capitals till Alan 
of Brittany laid it waste. A little way 
beyond it we turn a sharp corner and are 
on the Roman road. After speeding along 
this for some minutes it is interesting to 
look back and see the amazing straightness 
of the white streak that stretches away 
behind the car and disappears over the crest 
of the hill. The scenery is dull at first ; but 



80 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

presently a new line of moors and dales 
appears on the horizon, and the roadway 
itself is shaded with trees and fringed with 
grass and flowers. Meantime the surface is 
enough in itself to make a motorist happy. 
The car glides up the slope of a little 
bridge ; we pass a screen of trees ; and the 
extreme beauty of the Greta is revealed with 
a suddenness that is almost startling. This 
bridge with the stone parapet is the famous 
Greta Bridge ; this is the stream painted by 
Turner and sung by Scott ; there by the road- 
side are the gates of Rokeby. 

" Oh, Brignall banks are fresh and fair, 
And Greta woods are green I " 

Brignall banks are not in sight, but here are 
Greta woods — intensely green — flinging their 
branches across the river till they meet and 
interlace in an archway over the clear water 
and the yellow stones. 

At the northern limit of Rokeby Park we 
must leave the highway. There is a road 
here that is not marked on Bartholomew's 
map — a road that turns to the right and leads 
to Mortham Tower, and the Dairy Bridge, 




it P 

I \ ,\ 2 V * * 






m 



THE DALES 81 

and the meeting of the Greta and the Tees. 
The "battled tower" of Mortham is now 
inhabited ; we may not see the bloodstains 
on the stairs ; but from a little distance the 
fifteenth-century peel and the Tudor build- 
ings that surround it make a pretty group. 
Below the grassy knoll on which it stands 
the Greta dashes down between its over- 
shadowing banks and veiling foliage to join 
the quieter, statelier Tees. 

The beauty of this place is really haunting. 
Sir Walter Scott has described every inch of 
it in " Rokeby," with complete accuracy if 
with no great inspiration. For the wild 
sweetness of this spot is not such as can be 
put into words. It is a place of enchant- 
ment, where the spell-bound poet can only 
stammer helplessly, and the plain man for 
a moment feels himself a poet. 

Returning to the main road, we follow the 
wooded Tees to Barnard Castle. For miles 
the river is as we saw it at the meeting of 
the waters, darkly shadowed by trees and 
bound by rocky banks ; more beautiful in 
itself than Wharfe or Swale, though flowing 
through a valley that cannot be compared 
7 



82 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

to the other dales except at its head : but 
there, I think, excelling them all. Through 
the greater part of Teesdale the beauty of 
the river is so closely confined to its banks 
that we only catch a glimpse of it now and 
then, when actually crossing the stream. 
One of these glimpses we have from the 
toll - bridge just below Eggleston Abbey, 
where we cross for a few minutes into the 
county of Durham. The ruins of the abbey 
are visible through the trees, standing on a 
grassy hill upon the Yorkshire bank of the 
river. 

At Barnard Castle — which is not a very 
attractive town at first sight, and is sorely 
disfigured by its portentous museum — we 
again cross the Tees into Yorkshire, near 
the point where the familiar towers of the 
Baliols' ruined fortress stand high above 
the river on their cliff. This commanding 
position was granted to the Norman Guy 
de Baliol by Rufus, and Guy's son Bernard 
raised on it the castle that was forfeited by 
his descendant. This Bernard was no friend 
to the throne on which the later Baliol sat, 
for he was the most zealous of the five 




Hi: DAiuv i:i;i[H.,i.. 



THE DALES 83 

knights who captured William of Scotland 
and took him to Richmond Castle. When 
the enterprise seemed about to fail, it was 
Bernard who cried : " If you should all turn 
back, I would go on alone ! " A little more 
than a hundred years later John Baliol, King 
of Scotland, was rashly refusing to be at the 
beck and call of the English king. " Has the 
fool done this folly?" asked Edward. "If 
he will not come to us we will come to him ! " 
So John lost his crown, and Barnard Castle 
saw the Baliols no more. It was given to the 
Nevilles, and so with many other things fell 
into the capacious hands of Richard III., who 
actually lived here for a time, and has left 
his symbol, the wild boar, upon the oriel 
window. 

There is one gracious memory that makes 
these towers sacred. The ruined halls are 
haunted by the presence of that gentle and 
sad lady who was the widow of one John 
Baliol and the mother of another — Devor- 
gilla, daughter of kings, foundress of Baliol 
College, and in her endless sorrow the builder 
of Dulce Cor. When her husband died she 
" had his dear heart embalmed and enshrined 



84 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

in a coffer of ivory, enamelled and bound 
with silver bright, which was placed before 
her daily in her hall as her sweet, silent com- 
panion." It was here at Bernard Castle that 
she chiefly lived with that silent companion, 
until the noble shrine of stone was ready to 
receive the ivory coffer; it was here she 
lived on alone, till she too died and was 
carried out to be buried in Sweetheart 
Abbey, with John Baliol's "dear heart" 
upon her breast. 

Of the two roads to Middleton-in-Teesdale 
the one on the Durham side is the best as 
regards both surface and scenery; but the 
greater number of those who drive up 
Teesdale will return to Barnard Castle 
before going on their way to the north or 
crossing Yorkshire to the coast, and will 
probably prefer to drive up the valley by 
one road and come down it again on 
the other. On the Yorkshire side there 
is nothing very striking. Lartington is 
pretty, and gay with flowers ; Cother- 
stone still has a fragment of the Fitz- 
Hughs' castle in a field above the 
river ; Romaldkirk has an interesting 



THE DALES 85 

church. Beyond Mickleton we cross the 
Lune, which is a miniature copy of the 
Tees, with the same rocky bed and the 
same close screen of overarching boughs. 
A few minutes later we cross the Tees 
itself and are in Middleton. 

The road from Middleton to High Force 
is surprisingly populous. Here among the 
hills, where the fields are yielding to moor- 
land, and the river flows under bare crags, 
one expects a certain amount of loneliness ; 
yet here is a broad and civilised highway, 
with all the character of a road near some 
large town. The scenery, however, is wild 
enough ; and more beautiful than anything 
we have seen. Beyond the river — open now 
to the sky, no longer veiled by trees — rise 
the moors, piled high, fold upon fold, grand 
in outline and glorious in colour, green and 
purple and crimson. A wood by the wayside 
blots out river and hills for a moment ; then 
suddenly through a gap we see High Force. 

Looking down from the road we see it as 
a picture framed in trees : the solid wall of 
rock, the leap of the foaming waters, the 
cloud of spray, the fir-trees with their spires 



86 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

against the sky, the crimson moors beyond. 
That white torrent is the boundary of the 
county, the crown and climax of the beauty 
of Yorkshire, and our last and most perfect 
memory of the dales. 



THE COAST 



SUMMARY OF TOUR ALONG THE COAST 

Distance. 

Yarm 

Saltburn 

Whitby 

Scarborough 

Total 



Roads 
Hills very steep and frequent near coast 
Surface usually good. 



... 21 


miles 


... 21 


,, 


... 25 


» 


... 67 


miles 



II 

THE COAST 

"VXTHEN one is approaching the coast of 
* » Yorkshire from the north, the im- 
portant thing is to avoid the manufacturing 
towns of Stockton and Middlesbrough. This 
can be done by crossing the Tees at Yarm, 
and joining the splendid road that runs so 
straightly from this point to the sea. Those 
who have come from the dales will notice 
at once, even in Yarm, how greatly the 
houses here differ from the houses of the 
west. In that fair land the buildings, both 
small and great, have the character common 
to moorland buildings : they are stern and 
sturdy and grey ; made not to please the 
eye, but to endure the buffetings of wind 
and rain. But these houses of the plain, 
it seems, do their best to provide the 



90 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

beauty that is lacking in scenery. They are 
warm and picturesque, red and tiled and 
gabled, a feature in the landscape. The 
wide street of Yarm, with its trees and 
grass and pretty buildings, has almost a 
foreign air. Beyond it is the straight road 
with the magnificent surface. 

The views from this road, to right and 
left, are rather striking, each in its own 
way. On the left the scene is not beautiful, 
yet not without romance — the romance that 
is hidden under so much that is ugly. That 
long, long line of tall chimneys and distant 
masts, that cloud of smoke that darkens 
all the sky, are symbols of the spirit 
of adventure, of the love of enterprise, of 
untiring progress, of belief in the future ; 
for surely the history of our commerce has 
included all these things. It was from 
Stockton that the first railway in the world 
ran to Darlington; and in Middlesbrough 
many of our merchant ships are built. 
Eighty years ago about a hundred people 
lived there : to-day there are a hundred 
thousand under that black pall. 

To the right of us is an equally long line 



THE COAST 91 

of another sort — the line of the Cleveland 
Moors. The curious excrescence of Rose- 
berry Topping is conspicuous from the first, 
and even at this distance the monument to 
Captain Cook is visible on the hillside. For 
it was in the little village of Marton, 
through which we pass on our way to 
Guisborough, that James Cook was born, 
and learnt his lessons in the village school 
when not employed in scaring crows. Rose- 
berry Topping, at first sight, looks like a 
huge tumulus. " It is the landmark that 
directs sailers, and a prognostick to the 
neighbours hereabouts." The view from 
its summit has been described by many 
writers, with degrees of enthusiasm varying 
from the "most agreeable prospect" of 
Camden to the ardour of another traveller, 
who declared that "there you may see a 
vewe the like whereof I never saw, or 
thinke that any traveller hath seene any 
comparable unto yt." A certain discreet 
author, quoting these words a hundred 
years ago, says gravely : " Accurate observa- 
tion and comparison forbid us to ratify this 
assertion in its full extent." 



92 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

The base of Roseberry Topping is largely 
composed of alum. In the reign of 
Elizabeth some alum works were set up at 
Guisborough, but were solemnly cursed by 
the Pope. His Holiness, it transpired, was 
himself the owner of some alum works. 

The actual streets of Guisborough are 
not attractive, but seen from a distance the 
general effect of the little place is rather 
charming. It lies in a valley with the hills 
of Cleveland behind it, and towering above 
it is the great east window of its priory, 
bereft so entirely of tracery that it has 
the air of some stately gateway. This 
lovely fragment, this graceful window with 
its pinnacles and crockets, is all, except a 
Norman gateway, that is left of the burial- 
place of the English Bruces — the once rich 
and famous Augustinian priory whose build- 
ings covered acres of ground, and whose 
prior " kept a most pompous house." At 
least two churches that have stood upon 
this spot were destroyed by fire, but it was 
not fire that caused this final destruction ; 
not, as in one of the other cases, the 
conduct of "a vile plumber with a wicked 



THE COAST 93 

disposition " ; not even primarily the zeal of 
Henry VIII.'s commissioner; but the van- 
dalism of one Chaloner, who bought it and 
hacked it to pieces. It was he who built 
the alum works that were so distasteful to 
the Pope, and it is quite possible that some 
of the stones of this Gothic masterpiece 
were used for the purpose. If this were 
the case, one could forgive the Pope for his 
methods of carrying on business. 

At Skelton, over there on the hill, lived 
the Bruces of the English branch, who 
founded the priory. Margaret Tudor, 
daughter of Henry VII. and wife of 
James IV. of Scotland, raised a splendid 
cenotaph here to her husband's ancestors, 
the Bruces of Annandale and Skelton, only 
a short time before her brother made the 
place desolate for ever. The cenotaph was 
moved to the parish church, and was 
broken up in the eighteenth century. Until 
quite lately pieces of it were scattered in 
various parts of the church and priory, but 
it has now been restored with great care 
and set up near the west door of the church, 
with all its statues of Scottish and English 



94 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Bruces except that of the greatest Bruce of 
all. King Robert's figure, it is believed, was 
on the west end that has long been lost. 
There is some fine old glass in this church, 
and a modern window of exceptional 
beauty. 

Guisborough is not a place to stay in; 
but only six miles away is Saltburn with 
all its hotels. The short drive thither is 
pretty, and close to the wayside on the 
right is Upleatham Church, the smallest 
used for services in England, with a 
miniature tower and a nave about fifteen 
feet long. Saltburn is a rising watering- 
place, and has probably a gay future before 
it, for it has many charms for those who 
like plenty of breezes and bathing-boxes. 
It must have been a lovely spot when it 
was quiet, for its deep green dell ends in a 
fine cliff, below which the sea ripples over 
a many-coloured foreshore. The Zetland 
Hotel faces these things. 

From Saltburn we may drive across to 
Brotton, or may take the longer way by 
Skelton, passing near the castle. This is 
now a house dating obviously from the 



THE COAST 95 

eighteenth century ; but I believe there are 
among its offices some slight remains of the 
castle of the Bruces — the castle that was, 
long after their day, the scene of much 
revelry on the part of its owner John Hall 
and his familiars. Among these was 
Laurence Sterne. " Its festive board," says 
a Georgian writer, "was attended by many 
of the literati of the age. Where genius 
and talent were blended in so close union 
we cannot but imagine that the feast of 
reason and the flow of soul were happily 
realised." According to authentic accounts 
the feast and the flow — not of reason 
nor of soul — made the place a perfect 
pandemonium. 

Beyond Brotton the fine outline of Boulby 
Cliff rises before us, marred by the huge 
ironworks that disfigure so many places in 
Cleveland. Loftus and Easington are un- 
interesting ; but a couple of miles after 
passing through the latter we dip into 
a lovely little tree-clad valley — one of 
the many green gorges that run down, 
"between the heather and the northern sea," 
with tumbling becks hurrying through them. 



96 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

We climb out of this one on a stiff gradient, 
and in another moment are looking down 
on Staithes. 

At the top of the hill that leads down 
into Staithes there is a little railway inn. 
Here it is advisable to leave the car, for 
the hill is exceedingly steep, and there is 
no place in the tiny fishing town itself 
where a car may find shelter. Visitors, in 
fact, are not encouraged. If, seeking food, 
you ring at a door that seems to offer hope, 
you are recommended to try elsewhere. 
Yet the day will surely come when a large 
hotel will rise upon the hill, and lodging- 
houses will grow up round it, and we shall 
hear of the "upper" and "lower" towns, 
the new town and the old, and Staithes 
will be spoilt. Meantime a cup of tea may 
be had at the railway inn, which, though 
homely, is extremely clean. 

Long ago James Cook, a little shop-boy 
hungry for the sea, ran away from Staithes. 
One marvels that any one could steel his 
heart to leave it. But to little James, 
hitherto occupied in the scaring of crows, 
Mr. Sanderson's shop under the hill was 




rill: IIAKI'.OUK, STAITHES. 



THE COAST 97 

merely the gate of a wonderful new world, 
and he hardly hesitated before passing 
through it to his adventurous life and 
death ; to the heights of Montcalm and the 
depths of hitherto unsounded waters, and 
finally to the knives of the South Seas. 
Even here, it is plain, he was dreaming of 
the South Seas. Some sailor brought a 
South Sea shilling to Staithes and Cook, 
seeing it in his master's till, was seized by 
the romance of it and changed it for a 
more prosaic coin. The transaction was 
suspicious in the eyes of Sanderson, and 
though he was sorry for his mistake when 
he understood it, James indignantly left 
him. 

Staithes is dear to every artist who has 
ever looked upon its streets and quays, and 
indeed to every one who has an eye for 
pictorial effect. The deep valley that we 
crossed a few minutes ago ends here at the 
sea in two cliffs, and between them the 
town is wedged. The narrow paved street 
winds down to the shore, where little quays 
are washed by the waves, and little cottages 
cling to the cliff for shelter, and boats are 
8 



98 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

drawn up on the beach. At the river's 
mouth, under the other cliff, hosts of 
seagulls whirl about the rocks or float 
upon the water ; but most deplorably the 
picturesque wooden bridge that has figured 
in so many works of art is now replaced 
by an unsightly iron girder. Staithes is a 
place apart. In this deep gully, hidden from 
land and sea, one seems to be worlds away 
from ordinary English life. Even the 
people are picturesque ; the women and 
little girls in pink or lilac sunbonnets and 
gay aprons, and the men and boys in dark 
blue knitted jerseys. Every group of 
children, every ancient mariner, every 
pretty girl in a doorway, is as decorative as 
a peasant in the chorus of an operetta. 

This coast is indented with bays. Runs- 
wick, only a few miles away, may be seen 
by making a short digression from Hinder- 
well — more correctly Hilda's Well — where 
there is a holy well named in honour of the 
saintly abbess of Whitby. Runswick Bay is 
sheltered on every side by hills. A long low 
headland sweeps round it on the south, with 
a strip of sandy beach following the line of 





'.,jM 






1 



THE COAST 99 

the land, and beyond the sand a curving 
line of surf. On the nearer side a cliff pro- 
tects a cluster of red-tiled houses, and on 
the summit of this cliff the car must be left 
while we walk down the winding path. It 
is only from below that the pretty grouping 
of the village can be seen. In the tourist 
season this bay is rather thickly populated, 
and as the place cannot accommodate more 
than a few of its admirers, the fields near 
the shore are dotted with the tents of the 
resolute. But there must be times when 
this lovely haven is a haven of peace. 

It is from the hill above Lythe that we 
first see the Whitby cliff in the distance, 
with the abbey standing up against the sky. 
The coast and its long line of surf are 
before us, and on the right are the trees 
of Mulgrave Park. The present castle of 
Mulgrave is modern, but there are still some 
ruins to be seen of the old fortress of the 
Saxon giant, Wada, and of the Norman 
Fossards and mediaeval Mauleys, and of the 
seventeenth-century President of the North, 
Lord Sheffield. It was one of the seven 
Peters of the house of de Malo-Lacu, or 



100 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Mauley, who beautified the castle so greatly 
to his own satisfaction that he called it 
Moult Grace. " But because it became a 
grievance to the neighbours thereabouts, 
the people (who have always the right of 
coining words), by changing one single 
letter, called it Moult Grave, by which 
name it is everywhere known." Both its 
grace and its seriousness were wiped away 
by the time the Civil War was done. 

The hill that leads from Lythe to the 
coast is nearly a mile long, and has gra- 
dients varying from 1 in 7 to 1 in 12. 
At the foot of it is Sandsend, as near to 
the sea as a place can stand. Here are 
the mouths of two little green valleys, each 
with its own little beck and each with 
its own little village. The villages, the old 
and the new, Sandsend and New Row, are 
very tiny indeed, but there is a good hotel 
between them, within reach of the salt 
spray, and houses are being busily built. 
The place is about to be fashionable, I 
think, and indeed it has charms, with the 
deep, green sides of the gorge at the back 
of it, and the sea foaming at its doors. 



THE COAST 101 

For the greater part of our way from 
Sandsend to Whitby we are on a private 
road, with a toll of one shilling. There are 
several sharp curves upon it, with "Special 
Caution" notices, and the sides of the gully 
at Upgang are very steep. 

Whitby, fifty or a hundred years ago, 
before the raucous cries of steam merry-go- 
rounds disturbed the ghost of Caedmon or 
grinning Aunt Sallies stood beside the 
Abbey Cross, must have been the loveliest 
town in England. Even now it is bewitch- 
ing. The old town and the new are sepa- 
rated by the long harbour, with its crowd of 
gaily painted cobles, its quays, its rows of 
nets hung out to dry ; and so, from the 
windows of the Royal Hotel on the one 
cliff, one can look across the water at the 
other cliff, and the old houses closely packed 
upon the slope, the red-tiled roofs, the high- 
pitched gables, the queer passages ; and 
raised high above these the grassy hilltop, 
the long, low church, the sloping graveyard 
where Mary Linskill lies, the tall grey 
cross of Csedmon. Crowning all stands the 
ruined abbey on its height. A long flight 



102 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

of steps winds up the steep hillside from 
the harbour to the abbey, skirting the 
churchyard ; and from this distance, in the 
dusk of evening, the stream of dark figures 
climbing endlessly might well be black-robed 
pilgrims. 

The tall gables of Whitby Abbey on its 
bare and desolate cliff are known to us in 
countless pictures. We are prepared for the 
general effect of wild stateliness, the turrets 
against the sky, the wind-swept height, the 
whirling seabirds ; but the beauty of the 
architecture is a surprise to some of us — 
the slender lancets, the rich triforium and 
trefoiled arches, the rose window, and all 
the wealth of ornament. The ruins of the 
tower lie where they fell, a mass of debris 
overgrown with grass and weeds. Here 
under the grey-brown walls, which are 
crumbled and bitten by the salt wind like 
a cliff against which the spray has dashed 
for centuries, we may sit and remember 
the saints and kings who came to this 
place when our history was young. It is 
not of the actual builders of these arches 
that we chiefly think. Hundreds of years 



THE COAST 103 

before their day a monastery stood here, 
whose fame has always overshadowed this 
later one. This is the story of it : — 

In the seventh century King Oswy of 
Northumbria and King Penda of the 
Mercians were at war. In vain Oswy 
offered conciliatory gifts : Penda would have 
none of them. " If that pagan," cried the 
exasperated Oswy, " refuses to receive our 
gifts we will offer them to the Lord, who 
knows how to accept them ! " So he vowed, 
if he defeated the "wicked king," to dedi- 
cate his baby daughter to the cloister and 
give sites for twelve monasteries. This 
bleak cliff, then called Streaneshalch, the 
Bay of the Lighthouse, was one of the sites 
he gave when he had killed Penda, " that 
destroyer of his neighbours and fomenter of 
hostility," as William of Malmesbury calls 
him ; and on it a monastery was built by 
the royal and saintly Abbess Hilda, "whom 
all that knew her called Mother, for her 
singular piety and grace." Here she ruled 
for many years, teaching peace and charity, 
training holy men — St. Wilfrid of Ripon, 
St. John of Beverley — and even conquering 



104 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

snakes and birds, it was said. Important 
things took place here during her rule. It 
was here that the great synod was held 
concerning the keeping of Easter, when St. 
Wilfrid quoted St. Peter and Colman quoted 
Columba till King Oswy closed the discussion 
by saying, "Peter is an officer whom I am 
not disposed to contradict . . . lest when I 
come to the doors of the kingdom of heaven 
there may be no one to open them to me." 
And it was here, somewhere within a stone's 
throw of this actual spot, that Caedmon, 
the lay-brother, the herdsman "who did 
not learn the art of poetry from man but 
from God," stood before St. Hilda in the 
presence of learned men, and told his vision 
and recited the verses that were the first 
English poem. "And his song and his 
verse were so winsome to hear, that his 
teachers themselves wrote and learned from 
his mouth." It was somewhere close at 
hand, too, that this earliest of our poets 
lay down to die in the infirmary, "convers- 
ing pleasantly in a joyful manner." " I am 
in charity, my children," he said, "with all 
the servants of God." Then he crossed him- 




win i t.y \r,r.i:v. ivri ■ i;u>i:. 



THE COAST 105 

self, "laid his head on the pillow, and 
falling into a slumber, ended his life so in 
silence." St. Hilda herself, "whose life was 
a bright example to all who desired to live 
well," died and was buried here, but her 
bones were afterwards taken to Glaston- 
bury. The dust of her successor, however — 
that Princess Elfleda whom Oswy dedicated 
to the religious life when he defeated 
Penda — lies somewhere very near this spot, 
within the abbey church itself, with that 
of the king her father, and her mother, 
Queen Eanfled. And down there on the 
slope, where the old cross stands, was the 
graveyard of the monks and in it the grave 
of Csedmon. 

In the ninth century came the sons of 
Lothbroc the Dane, Hinguar and Hubba, 
"men of terrible obstinacy and unheard-of 
valour." Flying the invincible standard 
which their sisters had made with their 
own hands, they landed on this coast and 
utterly destroyed the monastery of Streane- 
shalch. 

For two hundred years this spot lay 
desolate. Then Reinfrid the soldier saw it, 



106 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

and was " pricked to the heart." He became 
a monk of Evesham, and after long years 
came back to Streaneshalch — by that time 
also called " Hwiteby " — to carry on the 
traditions of the past. He began the work 
of raising the new abbey on the site of the 
old ; but it was those who came after him 
who built that early English chancel, and 
carved the lilies of the north transept, and 
made the decorated window through which 
we see the church, and the bluff headlands, 
and the white teeth of the North Sea for 
ever biting at the cliff. 

There is no need to return to the town, for 
we can join the high-road to Scarborough 
at a point not far from here. By going a 
few miles out of the direct route we may 
see another of the sheltered bays that 
make this coast so beautiful ; the bay where 
long ago, it is said, a fleet of fishing-boats 
was always ready to carry Robin Hood 
and his merry men to safety. Robin 
Hood's Butts, on the further side of the 
bay, are supposed to have been used as 
targets for his bowmen by that "most kind 
and obliging robber," as a sixteenth-century 



THE COAST 107 

writer calls him. A long, steep hill leads 
down into the little town, which lies on 
the northern side of the crescent bay ; the 
old town with its red houses clustered in 
the shelter of the cliff, its walls washed by 
the spray; the new town higher up the 
slope. There, below us, is the quay where 
John Wesley so often preached. It was 
there that he received — not without seeing 
the humour of it — the sailor's remon- 
strance against the theory that the fear of 
death could only be overcome by the fear 
of God. The sailor evidently felt that his 
reputation was at stake. 

This lower and most romantic part of 
Bay Town is far the most attractive, but 
even the upper town is not unpleasing, 
though it has several little hotels, and 
threatens to develop into a watering- 
place. There is a road that leads out of 
the valley on the further side, but it is 
extremely bad in every way, and it is 
practically imperative to return as we came. 

Soon after regaining the high-road we 
climb slowly up to the moors. Looking 
back we can still see the cleft in the hills 



108 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

where Whitby's red houses are hidden, and 
the headlands beyond it, and the stately 
abbey on the cliff. Before us there is a run 
so entrancing, a feast of colour so deeply 
satisfying, that these moors of Cleveland 
must henceforward, I think, be the standard 
by which we appraise all moorland runs. 
The road lies visible in front of us for 
miles : at times so straight that the teleg- 
raph wires are foreshortened till the posts 
are hardly distinguishable one from another ; 
at other times winding in serpentine curves 
into the far distance. On each side of us, 
from the wheels of the hurrying car to the 
horizon, stretches the heather. Here and 
there is a patch of bracken, now and then 
a strip of yellow grass ; but it is heather 
that makes the landscape, that flings its 
imperial robes over the hills and nestles 
under the wayside stones, that satisfies the 
eye and rests the heart with its astonishing 
beauty. Miles of road fly under us; we 
glide up and we dart down ; now we dip 
into a ferny dell and climb out of it again, 
now we cross a stony beck, now we pass 
a plantation of firs; but still the setting 




II'I'P.V i! iRBOl B. 



THE COAST 109 

is heather, deep bell-heather and pale ling, 
purple and crimson and mauve, sweeping 
away till the colours are merged in blue. 
Bluest of all is the sea, which appears now 
and then in a triangle of sapphire at the 
end of a glen. On the shores of that blue 
sea, a couple of miles to our left, is Ravens- 
car, which takes its name from the raven 
standard of the sons of Danish Lothbroc, 
who landed here when they came to de- 
vastate St. Hilda's abbey. Such at least 
is the tradition. 

Gradually, and most reluctantly, we leave 
these shining heights for the lower world. 
The heather gives way to fields ; the road 
is again bounded by respectable stone walls 
We pass Claughton, then run down a steep 
hill between trees. Beyond these fir-trees, 
which rise up like walls on each side of the 
road, Scarborough appears — a dim mass of 
red blurred with smoke — and its castle 
lifted high above it on the headland. 

" The toune stondith hole on a slaty clife," 
says Leland, " and shoith very fair to the 
se side." How very fair this place must 
have been one can easily imagine, when 



110 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

there was nothing here but the picturesque 
town of a Tudor day, and the "exceding 
goodly larg and strong castelle on a stepe 
rok," and the " paroche chirch of our Lady 
joyning almost to the castelle," and the 
" 3 howsis of freres, grey, blake, and white," 
and the sea-wall made by Richard III., 
"now yn ruine by the se rage," and the 
" peere whereby socour is made for shippes," 
which, when Leland saw it, was " sore de- 
cayid." The town was partly walled then, 
too, and had two gates, one " meatley good," 
and one " very base." Only one or two of 
all these things are left, and even they are 
now as sore decayed as was the pier of 
Henry VIII.'s time. Yet Scarborough is 
still exceeding fair; so fair that it over- 
comes all one's prejudices against popular 
watering-places ; fair even in spite of huge 
hotels and a beach black with people, and 
rows of ice-cream stalls, and braying bands, 
and hoarse hurdy-gurdies, and all kinds of 
music. It is built at the junction of two 
bays, between which the castle juts out 
on " a rock of wonderful height and 
bigness, inaccessible by reason of steep 




IIP 



f •• *, t& VI * ' 



MB m 



h&9 



■■* 




THE COAST 111 

craggs almost on every side." Into both of 
these bays the North Sea sweeps, even 
upon the calmest day, in mighty curves of 
frothing surf. Below the castle is a little 
sheltered harbour, where a crowd of fishing- 
boats and smacks is protected from the 
" se rage " by breakwaters. Quite lately 
a wide road with an embankment has been 
built from bay to bay round the base of 
the castle promontory. Those who have 
loved the rough rocks that once were here 
feel naturally that this new drive spoils 
the beauty of the place. But, after all, 
Scarborough is not designed for lovers of 
wild nature. The mischief was done here 
long ago. The new drive is a boon to 
thousands who have to take their pleasure 
in bath-chairs, and in this place of esplanades 
and lawn-tennis court and smart clothes a 
little more artificiality is no great grievance. 
From very early days this rock has been 
fortified. In the Heimskringla, I believe, 
those who can may read how Harald the 
Norseman landed near the strong fortress 
of Skardaburg, and how he and his men 
climbed the hill behind the town and made 



112 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

a mighty bonfire ; then, with pitchforks, 
flung the burning faggots down among the 
wooden houses. "There the Northmen 
killed many people." The present castle 
was originally built by William le Gros, 
one of the heroes of the Battle of the 
Standard, who " increased the natural 
strength of the place by a very costly 
work." Henry III. in his fear of his barons 
ordered it to be destroyed, and when its 
owner demurred came to destroy it himself. 
When he saw the costly work, however, 
he bethought him of another destiny for 
it. He made it a little stronger and kept 
it himself. 

Scarborough Castle has never yielded 
except to guile or famine. When Piers 
Gaveston, the silly favourite of a silly king, 
took refuge here from the barons who 
were tired of his wit and his insulting 
nicknames, it was famine that made him 
surrender himself and his ill-gotten goods 
— crown jewels and all — to Warwick, " the 
Black Dog," and Pembroke, "the Jew." 
The great Douglas, by the English named 
the "Black" and by the Scots the "Good," 



THE COAST 113 

the guardian of the Bruce's heart and the 
hero of seventy fights, attacked Scarborough 
Castle in vain ; and more than two hundred 
years later Robert Aske and his Pilgrims 
of Grace, though they took the town, 
failed to make any impression whatever 
upon the fortress. There was a certain 
market-day in Mary's reign, however, when 
a party of peasants strolled up this castle 
hill, and without any ado were allowed to 
pass with their wares between those round 
towers which we still may see, and over the 
two draw-bridges, and past the keep into 
the castle bailey. Perhaps the sentinels were 
a little surprised at the number of peasants 
who came to sell butter and eggs that day, 
but they were certainly more surprised 
when they saw their castle in the hands 
of Thomas Stafford and the rest of the 
smocked rebels. The masquerade cost 
Stafford his life, and did his cause no 
good at all. 

Twice again was Scarborough Castle 

attacked, both times in the Civil War, both 

times by the army of the Parliament. It 

was during the first of these sieges that 

9 



114 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

the church — the " paroche chirch joyning 
almost to the castelle " — lost its chancel. 
There are still gaunt fragments of it 
standing like pillars in the churchyard, as 
we may see. The choir was turned into 
a battery, but received more hurt than it 
gave before the castle yielded at last to 
starvation so terrible that some of the 
garrison were carried out in sheets. Then 
a Parliament-man was put in as governor, 
but as he shortly afterwards declared for 
the king the siege began again. The 
Parliament took no more risks. When 
they had retaken it, and dealt with it as 
their manner was, Scarborough Castle was 
no longer very redoubtable. 

Its state of disrepair was a cause of 
much discomfort to poor George Fox a 
few years later ; for this dilapidated building 
was one of his many prisons, and he found 
it far from weather-proof. The home-made 
suit of leather that impressed Carlyle so 
much — " the one continuous including case " 
— must have been worn out by this time, 
I think, for the wetness of his clothes was 
one of the great Quaker's most constant 



THE COAST 115 

afflictions. When the smoky chimney 
prompted him to tax the Roman Catholic 
governor with sending him to Purgatory 
he was put into a room that had no fire- 
place at all. " Being to the sea-side," he 
says of it, " and lying much open, the 
wind drove in the rain forcibly, so that the 
water came over my bed and ran about 
the room, that I was fain to skim it up 
with a platter." Here he received dis- 
tinguished visitors, and argued about the 
Pope's infallibility with as much spirit 
as ever. 

The maimed church that stands below 
the castle on the slope is not now so im- 
posing as once it was, but it is still a fine 
building and has four chantries. In its 
shadow lies Anne Bronte. From the road 
leading to the castle gate, at a point near 
the fountain, one may see by looking over 
the wall of the churchyard the upright 
stone that bears her name. When she 
was dying, her sister Charlotte, with the 
desperate hope of those who despair, 
brought her to Scarborough, whose bay 
and headlands gave her the last pleasure 



116 MOTOR TOUES IN YORKSHIRE 

she had. "It made her happy," wrote 
Charlotte, "to see Scarborough and its 
bay once more. . . . Our lodgings are 
pleasant, as Anne sits at the window she 
can look down on the sea."' 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 



SUMMARY OF TOUR IN MID -YORKSHIRE 

Distances. 
Scarborough 

Helmsley, via Hackness and Lasting- 
ham 41 miles 

(Rievaulx and back 6 ,, ) 

York, via Sheriff Hutton and Kirkham 36 „ 

Total 83 miles 

Roads. 
No very serious hills except at Rievaulx. 
Surface : main roads excellent ; by-roads poor, 



Ill 

CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 

T~T is hard to turn away from the sea so 
-*- soon. If we find it too hard to bear we 
may stay at Scarborough for a couple of 
nights, and, taking a short run down the 
coast, may see Filey, and the white cliffs 
of Flamborough, and the beautiful priory 
church of Bridlington, in a few hours. 
Then we can turn westwards with less 
discontent, especially if we make a short 
detour by Scalby, Slackness, and the Forge 
Valley. 

Hackness lies in a nest of trees. Every 
road that leads to it is lovely. As we run 
down through glades and woods to this 
sheltered, still retreat, this green bower of 
sweeping boughs, it is easy to understand 
how deeply restful it must have seemed to 



120 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

St. Hilda of Whitby and to the monks of 
a later day. Hilda founded the tiny com- 
munity here, and made it a cell of her own 
great abbey, hoping, perhaps, to come here 
herself sometimes when she was tired of 
living in the teeth of the wind. The little 
grey church, wrapped and hidden in the 
trees, is partly Norman, partly Early English, 
but has various relics in it belonging to the 
Saxon life of Hilda's nunnery : a broken 
cross or pillar inscribed with runes, and a 
Saxon stone built into a Norman arch. A 
tablet on the wall tells how " the Lady 
Hilda of royal descent did for the sake of 
security and retirement establish a nunnery 
or cell for 8 nuns at Hackness." The for- 
tunes of the place rose and fell with those 
of its parent abbey, for when Whitby was 
destroyed by the Danes in the ninth century, 
Hackness, too, was utterly wiped out. Then 
came the Norman revival. But " thieves 
and robbers coming out of the forests and 
dens where they lurked, carried away all 
the monks' substance, and laid that holy 
place — Whitby Abbey — desolate. In like 
manner pirates, void of all compassion, 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 121 

landing there, came and plundered the mon- 
astery." So the monks' benefactor, William 
de Percy, gave them this retreat, already 
sacred to the memory of their great prede- 
cessor, where, like her, they might find 
security and retirement. Even to-day those 
priceless boons are to be found at Hackness. 
Even on an August afternoon, when the 
Forge Valley may almost be described as 
crowded, there are security and retirement 
in the green nest at Hackness. 

Two miles of moderately pretty country 
lie between these two places. We see the 
thick woods before us like a wall across 
the landscape, and the archway of trees 
that spans the road is the gate into the 
Forge Valley. This little glen is too famous 
for its own good ; but not a word of its 
fame is undeserved. In the early morning 
it must be quite perfect in its own gentle 
way, with its little river winding under 
the trees beside the road, and the grassy 
banks, and the cool woods rising on each 
side, and the paths that leave the wayside 
and disappear alluringly into the shadows. 
But in the afternoon of a summer's day, 



122 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

when the grass is strewn with bowler hats, 
and every birch-tree is the background of 
a family group, flight is best. The flight is 
quite a short one, for the valley is on a 
miniature scale. 

At its mouth, in a field beside the Der- 
went, is the ruin that was once Ayton 
Castle, a shattered tower that seems to 
have had many owners in turn, Attons 
and St. Johns and Euers and Cliffords, and 
was no doubt very useful in defending the 
narrow defile through which we have just 
driven. It came to the Cliffords with Mar- 
garet Bromflete, who was descended from 
one of the Attons, and was the wife of 
Clifford the Butcher. This was the Lady 
Clifford who saved her son's life by sending 
him away into hiding when the cause of 
the Red Rose seemed altogether lost : so 
this fragment of masonry is probably one 
of the many castles that were restored to 
the Shepherd Lord when Henry VII. became 
king. It is a place after the Shepherd's 
own heart, for in his day no doubt the 
valley of the Forge was as peaceful as 
Hackness. Indeed, only a hundred years 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 123 

ago, a writer described the neighbourhood 
of Ayton as "grotesquely rural." 

The beauty of the scenery ends rather 
suddenly as we drive through the two 
Aytons, East and West, and go on our way 
to Pickering. However, the road is level 
and has an excellent surface, and if the 
landscape is a little dull the villages are 
pretty. We pass through a series of them, 
all more or less alike and all built mainly 
of grey stone, for we are near the moors. 
On the outskirts of Brompton is Gallows 
Hill, whence, from her brother's farm, "the 
phantom of delight," Mary Hutchinson, came 
out one autumn morning to marry Words- 
worth in the church whose spire rises on 
our left. With the bridegroom was Dorothy, 
a little sad-hearted we may guess ; and with 
the " perfect woman " was her sister Joanna, 
that " wild-hearted " girl who found her 
brother-in-law's " dear friendships with the 
streams and groves" so comical that her 
laughter on the subject once raised echoes 
from all the hills of Grasmere. The church 
in which this wedding took place is in- 
teresting for its own sake, and contains, I 



124 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

have read, a memorial to a sixteenth-century 
soldier, "who in wars to his greit charges 
sarved oin kyng and tow quenes with du 
obediens and died without recumpens." I 
did not see this, but quote it for the sake 
of those who collect curious epitaphs.* 

Beyond Brompton the road skirts Ebber- 
ston and Allerston, and passes through 
Thornton-le-Dale, where a stream of some 
size runs by the wayside from end to end 
of the village, and an old cross stands 
among flowers. This village has a name 
for beauty, and like some other beauties 
takes a little too much pains to keep that 
reputation. It is certainly a pretty village, 
but it has rather a self-conscious air. 
Pickering is about two miles away. 

Pickering is not particularly beautiful, 
but its ruined castle, and above all its 
wonderful church, should certainly be seen, 
for one rarely finds a church whose relics 
represent so many dates. The font is 
Saxon, the pulpit Chippendale, and between 
these two extremes of craftsmanship — the 
roughly hewn stone and the delicately 
* " North Riding of Yorkshire." J. E. Morris. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 125 

chiselled wood — are the fourteenth-century 
tombs and the fifteenth-century frescoes, 
and the Elizabethan chest. When Leland 
was here he saw and noted this figure of 
Sir William Bruce, and the " cantuarie 
bering his name," and that other effigy, of 
alabaster, with the "garland about his 
helmet," which represents Sir David Rou- 
cliffe and no Bruce, though Leland calls him 
one. Of these strange frescoes above our 
heads, which make the special fame of 
Pickering Church, there is no word in 
Leland's record. Possibly these pictured 
saints and virtues — St. Christopher and St. 
George and the Corporal Acts of Mercy — 
were so often to be seen in churches of 
his day that they did not call for comment, 
or it may be that they were already hidden 
under the thick coat of plaster that covered 
them for hundreds of years. They were 
discovered in the middle of the nineteenth 
century, and promptly whitewashed without 
fear or favour. The most elaborate of the 
pictures is the Feast of Herod, which shows 
that king dressed in mediaeval garments 
suggestive of Mrs. Markham's History, while 



126 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

John the Baptist is being horribly beheaded 
in the corner. 

The remains of the castle are above the 
town ; but the names of Rosamund's tower 
and the Devil's are more romantic than 
their appearance, and the inevitable lawn- 
tennis court can be more easily forgiven 
here than in the baileys of more beautiful 
ruins. This castle belonged to the house of 
Lancaster, and therefore in his day to that 
Lancaster, " the Actor," whom Piers Gave- 
stone in his last moments besought for 
mercy, the Lancaster who so shortly after- 
wards was crying " Have mercy on me, 
King of Heaven ! " when his turn came to 
be beheaded. It belonged, too, to the 
" time-honoured Lancaster " whose son im- 
prisoned Richard II. for a little while within 
these very walls. All the prisons, it seems, 
to which Henry IV. committed Richard — 
Knaresborough, Pickering, Pontefract — were 
his own Lancastrian castles, and at Henry's 
accession, of course, became crown property. 
This one, which held for the King in the 
Civil War, still belongs to the Duchy of 
Lancaster. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 127 

Not many miles from Pickering, at the 
very brink of the moors, is a village whose 
name is familiar to lovers of old buildings 
and students of church history, and whose 
charms of seclusion and quietness are so 
endearing that even the unlearned are likely 
to think of it again and again with affection. 
I do not think " excursions " ever go to 
Lastingham. There is nothing there to at- 
tract those who visit a sacred ruin to play 
games in its aisles, or to sit on the high 
altar till it becomes necessary to enclose it 
with a railing, or to photograph their fiancees 
under its arches. These are only drawn by 
a famous name. The fame of Lastingham 
is hidden in a few ancient books, and in 
the works of archaeologists, and in the 
memories of those who have sought peace 
and found it there. To reach it we must 
turn to the right a couple of miles beyond 
Pickering, and drive by winding ways and 
on rather an indifferent surface to the foot 
of the moors. 

It is at Cropton that the moors first 
come into sight. The scenery has been un- 
interesting since we left the Forge Valley, 



128 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

and it is with all the more delight that 
we suddenly, at a turn of the road, find 
the landscape filled with colour and warmth 
and beauty, with hills green in the fore- 
ground and gloriously crimson against the 
sky. The road curves and twists and curves 
again, as though hunting for Lastingham 
among the little valleys. It seems to be alto- 
gether lost, and then suddenly we find it. 

About twelve hundred and fifty years ago, 
when its history began, it was not so easily 
found. Ethelwald, king of the Deiri, wished 
to have a monastery in his own Northum- 
brian country — some peaceful spot to which, 
when he had a mind, he might retire for 
prayer and quietness during his life, and in 
which he might be buried when he died. 
So he summoned to him that " holy, wise, 
and good man," Cedd, Bishop of the East 
Angles and brother of St. Chad, and offered 
him a piece of land. Cedd " chose himself 
a place among craggy and distant moun- 
tains which looked like lurking-places for 
robbers ... to the end that the fruits of 
good works should spring up where before 
beasts were wont to dwell, or men to live 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 129 

after the manner of beasts." Such is Bede's 
rather overdrawn description of this green 
hollow among the rounded hills; yet some 
say that Bede visited the place himself. 
Having chosen the spot it was necessary 
" to cleanse the place for the monastery 
from former crimes," so Cedd and his brother 
Cynebil kept between them a forty days' 
fast upon that little knoll where the church 
stands, uplifted above the village. There the 
monastery rose, and thither the bishop often 
came to see that all was well. Once he 
came at a time " when there was a mortality 
there," and, catching the epidemic, he died. 
And so it happens that the dust of this 
Saxon saint lies beneath the crypt of Last- 
ingham Church. 

Cedd's brother, the famous Chad, to whom 
so many churches are dedicated, succeeded 
him as abbot, and was often here. In con- 
nection with him Bede tells a poetical story 
of a monk of Lastingham. Oswini was a 
practical man, and felt himself unfitted for 
the contemplative life, yet greatly longed to 
renounce the world. So " quitting all he 
had " — he had been a Queen's Prime Minister 
10 



130 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

— he came to St. Chad here on this little 
hill, and, pointing to the hatchet and axe 
that he had brought in his hand, put him- 
self and them at the service of the monks. 
So while the others prayed Brother Oswini 
worked. And it was he, the humble worker 
with his hands, and not the monks upon 
their knees in the church, who heard the 
voices of the heavenly choir. He was " doing 
such things as were necessary " in the house 
when, " on a sudden," as he afterwards said, 
" he heard the voice of persons singing most 
sweetly and rejoicing, and appearing to de- 
scend from heaven." This sound of singing 
surged round the oratory where Chad was 
at prayer, then returned to heaven, "the 
way it came, with inexpressible sweetness." 
None heard it but the saint and the man 
of labour. Chad knew the meaning of it. 
"They were angelic spirits," he said, "who 
came to call me to my heavenly reward, 
which I have always longed after." Seven 
days later, says the historian, the bishop 
died. 

This gate and path will lead us to the 
knoll where all these things happened, except 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 131 

the actual death of Chad. Here Brother 
Oswini worked and heard the angels sing : 
here Cedd fasted and died. Here in this 
little crypt, which we reach through the 
strange walled opening in the nave, his 
dust lies on the right of the altar. Some 
say that these Saxon stones with the fishes 
and dragons carved upon them have been 
here ever since the days of Cedd ; but 
the sturdy piers and vaulted ceiling of the 
miniature chapel are, of course, Norman. 
They, and the apse above them, were pro- 
bably the work of those monks of Whitby 
who founded the Abbey of St. Mary at 
York, and seem to have paused here for 
ten years on their way thither. 

The street by which we entered Lasting- 
ham winds down the slope to the foot of 
the hollow ; on the right of it is the re- 
stored Well of St. Cedd in its stone basin. 
The heather of the huge Cleveland moors is 
hardly more than a stone's-throw distant ; 
and high upon the hill that overlooks the 
site of the Saxon monastery is a cross, not 
ancient, but very striking in this place. The 
tiny inn is close under the church. It is 



132 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

extremely small, and of the homeliest kind; 
but I think that any one who is not daunted 
by the simple life — the very simple life, be 
it plainly understood — will carry away plea- 
sant memories of the quietness and cleanli- 
ness and kindliness within its doors. It has, 
unfortunately, not even a shed wherein to 
shelter a car, but only a grass plot where a 
car may spend a fine night. 

We climb out of Lastingham by a road 
that passes close to the cross. This cross 
was set up in commemoration of Queen 
Victoria's accession, but there must surely 
have been another thought in the minds of 
those who placed it so symbolically in this 
particular spot. Let us pause for a moment 
and look down. The village lies below us 
in its little hollow, with the church of the 
early saints raised in its midst ; and just 
above us, conspicuous on its height and 
clearly outlined against the sky, stands the 
cross. It seems to guard the boundary 
between the poetry of Lastingham and the 
prose of the ordinary world, for the beauty 
that makes such a perfect setting for the 
place ends suddenly on the brow of the 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 133 

hill, and we speed away among commonplace 
fields and hedges to join the high-road by 
way of Appleton-le-Moor. 

At Keldholme, though the priory is marked 
on the map as though still in existence, only 
some stones built into a wall are left to 
show where de Stutteville's nunnery stood. 
As for the de Stutteville's own castle, which 
once rose proudly on the hill to our right, 
the stones of it form the walls of the neigh- 
bouring prison, and the site of it is a 
pasturage for the neighbouring cows. 

The prison in question — a dark, repellent 
spot in a pretty street — is in the market- 
place of Kirbymoorside. Nearly facing it 
is the " Black Swan," whose pretty red-tiled 
porch bears the date 1632 ; but it was the 
" King's Head," further up the street, to 
which Pope alluded when he said, neither 
truthfully nor politely, that the second Duke 
of Buckingham died at Kirbymoorside "in 
the worst inn's worst room." This trim, 
modern-looking house with the sober front 
of grey, so unsuggestive of the rakish duke, 
has never formed a part of the inn, and 
it was in its best room that Buckingham, 



134 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

on his deathbed, declared he had always 
had the greatest veneration for religion and 
reason. We may not cross the threshold of 
the room, into which the dying man was 
carried — and, indeed, even penitent upon his 
deathbed, George Villiers the second was 
hardly an object for pilgrimages ! — but here 
is its little window overlooking the street, 
the middle window of the three that 
are next the inn. Many writers, following 
Macaulay and Pope, assume that Bucking- 
ham died in this house because he had 
squandered his fortune so thoroughly that 
he could not secure a more comfortable 
place to die in. But some tell a more likely, 
if less edifying, tale. The duke was injured 
or taken ill, they say, while hunting near 
this town, and as his own castle of Helmsley 
was several miles away he was carried hither, 
to the house of one of his tenants. It seems 
certain that the estate of Helmsley was still 
his at his death, since his executors received 
nearly ninety thousand pounds for it from 
Charles Duncombe, banker and goldsmith. A 
man who had once possessed all that the 
Buckinghams had taken from their kings 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 135 

might be said to have squandered his for- 
tune without being actually in want of a 
roof to die under. He had at one time a 
very fine roof of his own here at Kirby- 
moorside, but this may have been one of 
the many things he had lost, or possibly the 
Civil War had left it in a state even less 
luxurious than this little grey house. By 
following a stony lane we may see, in a 
farmyard above the town, the few fragments 
of masonry that are the last remains of the 
castle of the Nevilles and the Buckinghams. 
Queen Elizabeth took it from the Nevilles, 
and her successor gave it to the man of 
whom he said : " You may be sure that I 
love the Earl of Buckingham more than 
any one else." 

The second duke, who died so humbly, was 
buried with his betters — among whom, I 
think, we may include his father — in West- 
minster Abbey. His body was embalmed, 
and the oft-quoted line in the register of 
burials at Kirbymoorside refers only to the 
viscera : " 1687 April 17th. Gorges vilaus Lord 
dooke of bookingam." 

About a mile beyond Kirbymoorside there 



136 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

is a little valley, not far from the high-road, 
of which perhaps the greater number of us 
have never heard. The appeal of Kirkdale, 
like that of Lastingham, is not to the many, 
and for that very reason it is irresistible to 
some ; not only to the man of science and the 
historian, but to all those who can best hear 
the voices of the dead in places where there 
are no voices of the living. There is silence 
in Kirkdale. 

A steep hill with a preposterous surface 
leads down to Hodge Beck ; to the wooden 
footbridge among the trees, and the quarry 
where the hyaenas used to live, and the splash 
that we must cross. Those limestone rocks 
to the right are famous in the world of 
science, for that dark cave whose entrance 
we may see was discovered, about a hundred 
years ago, to be strewn with the bones of 
strange beasts. It was a veritable treasury 
for geologists, for the hyaenas who lived and 
died here in such quantities not only 
bequeathed their own bones to us, but also 
many bones of the uncouth creatures they 
were in the habit of eating, creatures most 
happily no longer with us. There were once 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 137 

tigers and elephants, it appears, in quiet 
Kirkdale. 

We climb out of the beck and turn to the 
right. The narrow glen is thickly wooded, 
after the manner of Yorkshire dales both 
large and small, and in a clump of firs stands 
the Minster of St. Gregory. This is a fine 
name for so small a building ; but it was 
called a minster nearly nine hundred years 
ago, and we need not deny it the distinction 
in its venerable age. It is not for its beauty 
that we come to see it, though it is picturesque 
enough in its setting of trees ; but chiefly it is 
for the sake of one stone in its wall, and of 
the names inscribed upon it — names familiar 
yet remote, the names of Edward the King 
and Tosti the Earl. Here they are, carved in 
the lifetime of those who bore them. It is 
plain that this great stone was not always, 
as it is now, under a porch ; for it was once 
a sundial, and here it is always in the 
shadow. The words upon it are deeply and 
clearly graven, easily distinguished, and, 
except for a few words, easily understood. 
This is the whole inscription, carved in two 
columns, with one line below the dial : — 



138 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

" Orm Gamal Suna Bohte STS Gregorius Minster Wonne 
Hit Wes AE1 Tobrocan & Tofalan & He Hit Let Macan 
Newan From Grunde XPE & STS Gregorius In Eadward 
Dagum CNG & In Tosti Dagum Eorl, & Hawarth Me 
Wrohte & Brand, PES." 

(Orm GamaVa aon, bought St. Gregory's Minster when it 
was all tobroken and tofallen, and he it let be made new 
from ground to Christ and St. Gregory, in Edtuard's days, 
the King, and in TosWs days, the Earl, d Howarth me 
wrought, and Brand, Priests.) 

The sundial has its own legend: — 

" This is Daeges Solmerca Aet Ileum Tide.' 
(This is Day's aunmarker at every time.) 

This church, then, was made new from the 
ground in the middle of the eleventh century ; 
for it was in 1056 that Tosti, the son of the 
famous Godwin, obtained the earldom of 
Northumbria ; and it was in 1065 that he 
"impelled the Northumbrians to rebel, by 
the asperity of his manners," and so lost his 
earldom. In using these words William of 
Malmesbury is really most moderate, for 
Tosti seems to have been a terrible swash- 
buckler. He murdered, among many others, 
the son of the very man who rebuilt this 
church and set up this inscription : " All the 
sons of the traitor Godwin," says an old 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 139 

chronicler, "were men of such wickedness 
that if they saw any beautiful town belonging 
to any one they caused the lord of it to be 
slain by night, and his offspring to be 
destroyed, that they might obtain his 
property." On one occasion Tosti seized his 
brother Harold by the hair in the king's 
presence, while he was actually drinking his 
Majesty's health ; whereupon Harold lifted 
Tosti " up on high, and dashed him down 
on the floor." Such was the asperity of their 
manners. 

Edward the King is, of course, the Confessor, 
the " harmless king." 

Within the church there are two carved 
stones round which much discussion circles. 
Until lately they were in the outer wall, 
where they naturally suffered much from 
the climate. One of them — the one that has 
a cross engraved upon it — once bore the words 
" Cyning iEthilwald," or " King Ethelwald," in 
runic letters. Upon the slender foundation 
of this somewhat vague inscription it has 
been argued that this is the coffin lid of King 
Ethelwald : therefore Ethelwald was buried 
at Kirkdale : therefore Cedd's monastery, 



140 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

where Ethelwald wished to be buried, was at 
Kirkdale and not at Lastingham. This last 
conclusion is then turned into a premise, 
with a view to suggesting that the beautiful 
stone with the Celtic design upon it may be 
the coffin lid of Cedd himself. Yet Bede says 
that Cedd was buried at " Lestingau." 

The door of St. Gregory's Minster is locked. 
We may see the " sunmarker " and its clear 
lettering without entering the building, and 
also a slab of stone with an interlaced Celtic 
pattern which is let into the outer wall ; but 
to see the reputed coffin lids of Ethelwald and 
Cedd — which are beautiful specimens of Celtic 
work, whatever their story — we must drive to 
Nawton village, a mile away, and fetch the 
key from the Vicarage. This seems hard; 
and if hard for motorists, a hundred times 
harder for bicyclists and others. The York- 
shire churches are in the main very kind to the 
public. Many of them are left open, with a 
suggestive money-box close to the door, and 
often with a guide-book that may be 
borrowed. By this method the church 
probably gains rather than loses, since it 
is pleasanter to give half a crown to an old 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 141 

building that deserves it than to give sixpence 
to an old man who has learnt a few facts 
by rote, and learnt them wrongly. If it 
is possible, however, to forgive a church for 
being closed we must forgive this church of 
Kirkdale. It has again and again been 
defaced and desecrated by those curious folk 
who love their own insignificant initials more 
than any fairer sight. It is certain that those 
who care so little for a building as to treat it 
thus will not journey very far to fetch the 
key. 

The fine high-road that skirts the eastern 
moors, the road on which we have been 
travelling since we left Scarborough, comes 
to an end, in a sense, at Helmsley ; for here 
it splits up into two roads, each of which we 
must follow for a time. Helmsley itself has 
its attractions. Among them are an open 
market square and an ancient cross, pretty 
houses and an inn covered with flowers, a 
tiny stream running through the town from 
end to end, and a castle-keep upon the hill. 
This is that castle which was " once proud 
Buckingham's delight," and now stands with- 
in the park whose name is borrowed from 



142 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Duncombe the banker. Helmsley has passed 
through many hands, of which some helped 
in the making of history, and some were not 
over clean. The first name we hear of in 
connection with the place is no less a one 
than William the Conqueror, for he, having 
given Helmsley to one of his followers, chose 
it on one occasion for his own resting-place, 
after a heavy march and much hard work 
of the destructive kind he affected. His host, 
Earl Morton, lost these lands in the losing 
cause of Robert Curthose, and they fell to 
the famous Walter of Espec, one of the 
leaders in that strange semi-religious victory, 
the Battle of the Standard, whose heroes 
were summoned by an archbishop, absolved 
upon the field by a bishop, and actually over- 
shadowed through the fight by the consecrated 
Host and the banners of three saints. Just 
such a mixture as this, of religion and blood- 
shed, was Walter himself, with his splendid 
presence, his gigantic height, his bright eyes 
and noble forehead, his voice " like the sound 
of a trumpet," his life as a warrior, and his 
death as a monk. Walter's sister Adeline 
married Peter de Ros, and it was their great- 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 143 

grandson, Robert de Ros, who built this much 
dilapidated tower of Helmsley Castle. After 
long centuries of ownership by unimportant 
Williams and Roberts and Georges the place 
came into the fair hands of Katherine, the 
daughter of the Earl of Rutland, and the 
wholly undeserved wife of the first Duke of 
Buckingham. Lady Katherine Manners was 
not, as is sometimes said, the granddaughter 
of Sir Philip Sidney, for it was her Uncle 
Roger, not her father, who married Sidney's 
daughter. The Duchess of Buckingham in- 
herited all the wealth of her father's house, 
for her two little half-brothers died "by 
wicked practice and sorcery " : so Helmsley 
came to Steenie, whose angel-face brought 
him so much beside his nickname. All his 
honours and his riches were won, says 
Clarendon, " upon no other advantage or 
recommendation than of the beauty and 
gracefulness and becomingness of his person." 
Yet something more truly lovable than this, 
we may be sure, was needed to win his Kate 
and her broad lands ; and indeed the romance 
that gives this castle of Helmsley its chief 
interest remained romantic to the end, even 



144 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

though the duchess lived to write : " I pray 
God never woman may love a man as I have 
done you." 

James I.'s slave-dog, as he called himself, 
was too busy in court and camp to visit 
Helmsley much, if ever, but it must have 
been a fine sight when it was his. The keep, 
not then a crumbling fragment, rose high 
above walls and many towers. Here are 
still the two moats that surrounded them, 
and the two gateways that once made a 
double defence. How strong the defences 
were we may gather from the trouble they 
gave to Sir Thomas Fairfax when he besieged 
the castle in the time of the second Duke of 
Buckingham, and won it at last, not only 
for the Parliament, but for himself. His 
grateful country gave him the lands of 
Helmsley, but at the same time took the 
precaution of reducing the castle to ruins, 
so that this shattered keep and gatehouse 
should never again defend royalist or rebel. 
The Buckinghams were ever humorists, and 
the second duke, pondering how he might 
regain some of his lost possessions, bethought 
him of marrying Mary Fairfax. After he 




ii l'.I.E KVI l; \N( 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 145 

had been embroiled in many plots and 
suffered many imprisonments he settled 
down here within sight of the tower that 
his father-in-law had reduced to so sad a 
state. 

There, beyond the lawn-tennis court, is 
the house he lived in. Some of it seems to 
be older than his day, but he probably was 
obliged to repair it rather thoroughly after 
the siege. We may climb those steps, if we 
will, and enter. 

These are haunted rooms. They are not 
haunted by a very worthy ghost, I fear — 
not even by Steenie of the dainty leg and 
the lovely complexion, the gallant adven- 
turer whom many loved much and whom 
we all love a little — but only by his hand- 
some, vicious son, the son who was born 
to the sound of all the joy-bells of West- 
minster, and died in the humble little bed 
at Kirbymoorside. These rooms were once 
proud Buckingham's delight; now they tear 
at one's heart. It is a thing to be glad of, 
no doubt, that Lord Mayor Duncombe found 
Buckingham's home too small to hold his 
vaulting ambitions and so built the palace 
11 



146 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

in the park, leaving us this pitiful relic of 
departed glory. Yet one marvels that any 
man should have allowed so much beauty 
to go to wrack. These great oak panels 
with their rare design, this splendid moulded 
ceiling wrought so elaborately with Tudor 
roses, that frieze of shields and fleurs-de-lys, 
of mermaids and winged dragons, once made 
an appropriate setting for the man whom 
a contemporary called the "finest gentle- 
man of person and wit" he ever saw. Now, 
in their decayed grandeur, they are appro- 
priate still ; a dramatic — almost a melo- 
dramatic — symbol of his fate. Half the 
panelling is gone ; shred by shred the 
plaster of the ceiling is falling on the un- 
even floor ; bare laths and gaping holes 
disfigure the Tudor roses over our heads; 
of the mermaids and winged dragons only 
a few are left. Lumber is piled upon the 
floor where " all mankind's epitome " was 
wont to walk ; cobwebs and dust deface the 
windows. Such is the symbol of proud 
Buckingham, than whom "no man was ever 
handsomer," yet who was, in the last year 
of his life, "worn to a thread"; and up 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 147 

there in the park is the symbol of the city- 
knight who bought his property with money 
not always well-gained, and nourished like 
a green bay-tree. We see the unromantic, 
prosperous house of the thrifty Duncombe 
as we drive away to Rievaulx. 

Motorists will find it their best plan to 
visit the terrace of Rievaulx before seeing 
the abbey itself. The way lies through a 
gate on the left at the top of an extremely 
steep hill ; a winding lane leads among trees 
to a second gate, and here the car may 
safely be left. A few steps bring us to the 
famous terrace cut on the hillside by a 
Duncombe of the eighteenth century. For 
half a mile the wide and level turf is 
stretched between the woods that over- 
shadow it on the left, and the woods that 
fall steeply away from it on the right to 
the foot of the hill. Beyond the valley 
another wooded hill rises ; to the south are 
moors. If we stand at the brink of the 
terrace and look down through a gap in 
the trees we see, far below us, the pointed 
arches of Rievaulx Abbey. 

At each end of the terrace is a classical 



148 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

temple. At the north end, where we are 
standing, is the one described in the local 
guide-book as "a beautiful temple with an 
Ionic portico." At first sight it gives one 
a shock. Eighteenth -century buildings so 
often do give one a shock. 

If, however, we forget for a few minutes 
that Rievaulx Abbey lies down there in the 
valley, if we forget Walter of Espec and 
his monks, and remember only the days 
when this temple was built, the Ionic portico 
has its uses. It gives us a vision of the age 
of powder and hoops, of the fair ladies who 
rustled here on the soft turf when George 
was king. The closely cropped sward was 
suited to the dainty feet, the scenery not so 
" savage " as to wound the dainty suscepti- 
bilities. Indeed, in any century, this scene 
could only heal. 

There is a path that winds down the hill 
to the abbey, and if our car is independent 
of us this is the best way to go. But if 
she is unattended and cannot meet us in 
the valley we must drive down the steep 
hill to the village. The surface of this hill 
is composed of ruts and loose stones, but 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 149 

the beauty of the woods is compensation 
for nearly anything. 

If Fountains Abbey speaks of power, Rie- 
vaulx breathes peace. Taking everything 
into consideration, I think its beauty has 
only one rival in England. The valley of 
the Rye is far lovelier than Studley Park; 
the building itself is far lovelier than Bolton. 
Only Tintern can rival it ; not even 
Tintern can eclipse it. For at Tintern 
the feeling of Cistercian seclusion can only 
be acquired through the imagination : a 
high-road is close at hand ; a brisk trade 
in picture postcards and Goss china is carried 
on at the abbey door ; to be alone is almost 
impossible. But here at Rievaulx we may 
chance to stand in perfect solitude, perfect 
stillness, under the mighty archway that 
soars in dignified simplicity so far above 
our heads, and separates us as though by 
invisible gates from the world. No imagina- 
tion is needed here to conjure up the aloof- 
ness of the white monks — the actual fact 
is here. Through the empty windows — once 
filled, in defiance of the early Cistercian 
ideals, with some of the first efforts of 



150 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

English glass-stainers — we see the wild hill- 
side rising from the very walls, and above 
it the rampart of trees ; the grass under 
our feet grows like the grass of the field ; 
the world makes no sign, and on each side 
of us the slender arches point to heaven. 
There is something here that is more than 
beauty ; the very air seems charged with 
the prayers of holy men long dead. The 
weather-worn slab of the high altar is 
unfortunately enclosed by a railing, which 
is doubtless needed, in this Christian country, 
to save it from desecration. Not near this 
stone, as one might expect, but in the ruined 
chapter-house, lies the dust of the monk 
who came here in his old age to hide his 
" broad but well-featured face " under the 
shadow of a cowl, and to subdue his trumpet- 
like voice to the singing of psalms — the 
monk who had founded this abbey in the 
days when he was a famous soldier — Walter 
of Espec. 

Walter founded three monasteries : one at 
Kirkham, which we shall presently see; one 
here ; one at Wardon in Bedfordshire. In- 
corporated with Leland's Itinerary is a 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 151 

document which tells us how Walter's only- 
son fell from his horse and broke his neck 
upon a stone cross, and how in consequence 
Walter founded the monasteries of Kirkham 
and Rievaulx with some of the wealth for 
which he had now no heir. Dugdale, the 
seventeenth-century antiquarian, believed the 
tale, and told it for truth in his " Monasticon." 
Yet now we are bidden to reject the story 
of the younger Walter's sad end ; nay, even 
to doubt that he ever lived ! He is not 
mentioned, say those who know, in the 
foundation-charter of the abbey ; there is 
nowhere in any document a statement that 
Walter of Espec ever had a son. However, 
till we find a definite statement that he 
had none, we shall probably continue to 
accept or reject the story according to 
temperament. 

There are still some fragments of the 
actual church that was built by the eager 
hands of the monks from Clairvaux, the 
monks sent by St. Bernard himself to live 
their austere lives in this valley; but, of 
course, this rich triforium, these corbels of 
elaborate carving, these lancets and moulded 



152 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

arches and clustered columns were never 
seen by Norman Walter. Nor, indeed, would 
they have met with approval from the 
saintly abbot of Clairvaux, whose aspira- 
tions, like those of all the early Cistercians, 
tended to severe simplicity in architecture 
as in life. The vanished nave, it is thought, 
was part of the Norman work of Bernard's 
missionary monks, but this glorious chancel 
and the refectory with the strange doorway 
belong entirely to the thirteenth century. 

Beautiful as are the details it is by the 
great chancel -arch that we shall always 
remember Rievaulx. It is the reposeful- 
ness of its simple grandeur that strikes the 
keynote of peace. Its quiet, stately lines 
rest the eye, and the memory of it rests 
the heart whenever we think of this fair 
daughter of Citeaux and mother of Melrose. 

Long ago there was a second Cistercian 
abbey on the banks of Rye. The bells of 
Old Byland and the bells of Rievaulx 
clashed with one another, which for some 
reason shocked the Byland monks. Those 
who live in towns to-day, and Sunday by 
Sunday hear the bells of seven or eight 




?m : 




, ii \\( M. \l;i II. IMI.V \l l.\ iBBEY. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 153 

churches ringing simultaneously in varying 
keys, will sympathise with them ; but there 
seems to have been some idea in their 
minds beyond the obvious one, an idea 
strong enough to make them migrate first 
to Stocking and then to the spot where 
we may see the ruins of their abbey. 
Those who can spare the time will find 
that the beautiful west front of the second 
Byland repays them well for driving the 
few miles between the two ruins. The 
community that finally settled on this spot 
had been through a great deal. When 
they came here it was more than fifty 
years since the thirteen monks necessary 
to found a new house had left Furness to 
wander in their ox-waggon from place to 
place — from Furness to Cumberland, from 
Cumberland to Thirsk, from Thirsk to 
Byland-on-the-Moor, from Byland-on-the- 
Moor to Stocking, and from Stocking to 
their final home at last. None of the 
original thirteen can have seen the tre- 
foiled door and gigantic wheel-window of 
the west front; for this, the most striking 
part of the existing ruin, was probably 



154 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

the finishing touch to a very splendid 
church. 

Those who reach By land may perhaps 
like to drive about a mile and a half 
beyond it, to see the interesting church at 
Coxwold, and the house where Laurence 
Sterne lived for some time and wrote the 
greater part of "Tristram Shandy," alter- 
nated with many sermons. From Coxwold a 
series of byways will take them to the 
high-road at Brandsby. 

Those, however, who are unable to go 
beyond Rievaulx, must return to Helmsley. 
They may follow the Rye for a little 
while, and then, turning to the left with 
a last and lovely view of the abbey, may 
mount the hill through the woods, the 
fairy-haunted woods of Rievaulx, where 
the stems are not wrapped about with a 
confusion of undergrowth, but rise un- 
hampered from a carpet of ferns and 
creepers. This climb among the dusky 
trees is very short, but adds to one's sense 
of Rievaulx's remoteness. The shadowy still- 
ness of these woods is like a veil dropped 
between the valley and the world. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 155 

After driving through Helmsley we cross 
the Rye, and presently pass the upper 
entrance of Duncombe Park, the " Nelson 
Gate," erected as we see " to the memory 
of Lord Viscount Nelson, and the unparal- 
lelled gallant achievements of the British 
Navy." Between Helmsley and Sheriff 
Hutton, whither we are bound, lies some 
very pretty country of a pastoral kind, 
and a series of picturesque villages, several 
of which deserve more attention than we 
are likely to give them. 

Here, for instance, is Oswaldkirk, which 
might well tempt us to pause. It is 
scattered along the side of a hill, with its 
little houses half smothered in trees. The 
tiny church is open, and in it are some 
fragments of Saxon and Norman work, 
and a Jacobean pulpit which once held the 
famous John Tillotson, who began life in 
a tailor's shop and ended it as Archbishop 
of Canterbury. His success was chiefly due, 
I believe, to his eloquence, so we may 
regard this spot as the cradle of his for- 
tunes, since the sermon he preached here 
was his first. And here in Oswaldkirk 



156 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

was born another man of mark, the anti- 
quarian to whom we owe so much of our 
knowledge of the ruined monasteries, Roger 
Dodsworth. He collaborated with Dugdale 
in the " Monasticon," which was not published 
till after his death. The younger man in- 
herited the fruit of his researches, and has 
more or less eclipsed his name. 

A little more than a mile beyond Oswald- 
kirk is Gilling, one of the prettiest villages 
in the county. Its wide street is bordered 
by bright gardens; a tiny stream runs 
through it under a row of miniature 
bridges; on the left is a church with some 
interesting tombs ; and on the right, en- 
tirely hidden by the trees, is the castle 
of the Fairfaxes. Only those who have 
secured special permission are admitted to 
see this castle and its splendid Elizabethan 
Hall, of which the fame has reached many 
who were never in it. It is, according to 
all accounts, a marvel of rich ornament, 
of oaken panels and delicate inlay, of 
carved mouldings and stained glass and 
armorial shields. 

A road with a perfect surface carries us 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 157 

out of the village to the top of a hill — 
where one patch of heather by the way- 
side reminds us that we are on Grimston 
Moor — and on through Brandsby to Stilling- 
ton. The church we leave behind us as 
we turn sharply to the left has no special 
interest beyond the fact that Laurence 
Sterne preached many of his sermons in 
it, while he was living at Sutton-in-the- 
Forest and at Coxwold. Here in Stillington 
we leave the fine high-road for a very poor 
one — one that is a mere lane in fact — 
which leads us past the strange little 
church of Marton-on-the-Forest, with its 
crow-stepped gables and tower, to the 
village of Sheriff Hutton. 

" What is this forest call'd ? " we may 
be inclined to ask with Archbishop Scrope 
in " Henry IV." " Tis Gaultree Forest, an't 
shall please your grace." Even in Leland's 
time there was very little wood in the 
neighbourhood of Sheriff Hutton, and now 
the Forest of Galtres, so "impenetrable and 
swampy" when the Romans set to work 
to drain it, has practically vanished. A 
good proportion of it, I think, must always 



158 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

have been forest only in the technical 
sense, for we hear of it in the reign of 
Elizabeth as the scene of a yearly horse- 
race, wherein the prize for the winning 
horse was a little golden bell. Moreover, 
there is a tradition that wanderers in the 
Forest of Galtres, which reached to the 
outskirts of York, were guided by a light 
hung in the lantern tower of All Saints 
Church. Unless a great part of the coun- 
try were open — "low medows and morisch 
ground" — this light would not have greatly 
aided the belated traveller. Be that as it 
may, the country is now so open that as 
we draw near Sheriff Hutton we may see 
with a thrill, if we look very intently 
along the far horizon, the faint, elusive 
gleaming of York Minster. 

The castle of Sheriff Hutton is more 
impressive at a distance than close at 
hand. It is visible miles away across the 
flat country, and the jagged outlines of 
its cluster of towers stand up so im- 
posingly against the sky that one is led 
to expect something rather vast and effec- 
tive. But these gaunt remnants are all 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 159 

there is to see. They stand in a farmyard 
and are surrounded with haystacks. Once 
upon a time this castle was fine enough. 
It had eight or nine great towers, " and 
the stately staire up to the haul" was very 
magnificent, and so was " the haul it self, 
and al the residew of the house." It owed 
its splendour to the splendid Nevilles, to 
the great Warwick among others, who 
seems always to have lived in a state of 
kingly magnificence, as befitted one who 
made kings. When he died it passed, 
with his other castles, to his son-in-law 
Richard III., who used it as a prison for 
such claimants of the throne as he did 
not trouble to murder. There was humour 
in this plan of sending the two young 
cousins to keep each other company — 
Edward IV.'s daughter, Elizabeth of York, 
and the youthful Warwick, son of that 
Duke of Clarence who was drowned in a 
butt of Malmsey. They were not here very 
long, for hardly had their Uncle Richard's 
ill-gotten crown fallen under the hawthorn 
on Bosworth Field, before the new king's 
emissary was riding in all haste to Sheriff 



160 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Hutton. There was a crowd that day 
about this gate that still bears the arms 
of the Nevilles and of England, for from 
all the country round the people gathered 
to do honour to their future queen ; and 
as she was led out from her prison to 
share Henry's throne, the gentry of the 
neighbourhood, an eager bodyguard, pressed 
forward to escort her to London. Poor 
cousin Warwick went to London too, with 
a bodyguard of a sterner sort ; for since 
his claims could not, like Elizabeth's, be 
merged in those of the new king, he 
was destined for the Tower and the block. 
There is no record, apparently, of how 
this stately castle was transformed in the 
course of one century from a "Princely 
Logginges " to a mere shell. The usual 
death sentence of castles, "dismantled by 
order of the Parliament," was never pro- 
nounced in this case, for the mischief 
was done before Charles I. was king. In 
Henry VIII.'s reign this was for a time 
the home of that Duke of Norfolk who 
was the uncle of two queens, and lived 
to see them both upon the scaffold. He 




•***< 



V 




CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 161 

was a witness at Anne Boleyn's wedding 
and a judge at her trial, and was himself 
only saved from the block by Henry's 
death. His son Surrey, the sweet singer, 
has walked here too, where now the hay 
is stacked. 

Richard III. was here at least once, in 
the year before his death. He and his 
sad wife— sad all her life, but now heart- 
broken — came here to bury their little son. 
At the end of the sloping village street 
is the old church where they laid him; 
and there we may still see, not the place 
of his burial, for that is unknown, but 
the little alabaster figure that once lay 
upon his tomb. It has the air of being 
a good portrait. The features are still 
faintly visible ; the pathetic down-drawn 
mouth suggests that Anne Neville's son 
was not much happier than herself. Cir- 
cling the boyish head is a heavy crown, 
the only crown it ever wore. The reason 
that the Prince of Wales was buried here 
does not appear. Some suggest that his 
mother, who was with Richard at Not- 
tingham, could not bear to return to 
12 



162 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Middleham, and so met the funeral pro- 
cession here ; but there is at least one 
historian * who describes her despair when 
she saw her dead son in his own home. 
Elizabeth of York was probably at Sheriff 
Hutton when her little cousin Edward 
was brought here to his grave. She must 
have remembered another Edward, nearer 
and dearer to her, whose grave, not yet dis- 
covered, had been so lately made at the foot 
of the dark staircase in the Tower of London. 
This ancient church has some fine brasses 
in it. One of them is hidden beneath a 
trap-door in the floor ; another bears the 
figures of two babies in swaddling clothes. 
The church's patron saint is St. Helena, 
the mother of Constantine, and the dis- 
coverer, through a vision, of the Holy 
Cross. The historians give us a good deal 
of choice in the matter of this lady's 
origin. Some declare that she was the 
daughter of a British king, a woman of 
surprising beauty and intelligence ; but it 
seems to be more likely that her father 
was an innkeeper. 

* Croydon. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 163 

Sheriff Hutton is only about ten miles 
away from York, but if possible we should 
add a few miles to the distance by making 
a detour to Kirkham Priory. All that 
there is to be seen there is comprised in 
one picture, so to speak, a picture of an 
old gateway and the base of a cross ; but 
it is a picture that one remembers. 

To reach it we pass through country 
that is sometimes moderately pretty, some- 
times dull. There is a little church at 
Foston that is pleasant to the eye, with a 
red-tiled roof, and a miniature bell-tower, 
and a pathway where the yew-trees nearly 
meet. But we are now on the borderland 
between the beautiful part of Yorkshire 
and the uninteresting south-eastern plain. 
After we leave Kirkham we shall see little 
more of the beauties of nature. We shall 
see some beautiful architecture, and various 
things that are more appealing to the 
imagination than to the eye. And here, too, 
as is so often the case where the scenery 
is tame, the roads are sufficient in them- 
selves for the pleasure of the day's journey. 

About a mile beyond Foston we turn 



164 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

on to the high-road from Scarborough to 
York; but after a few moments leave it 
again for a road on the right, by which 
we slowly descend into the valley of the 
Derwent. The hillside is thickly wooded, 
and as we pass beyond the overarching 
trees we see Kirkham lying below us: the 
little village, and the wooded hill beyond 
it, and the beautiful gateway that is so 
entirely unlike all others, and, fringed with 
rushes, the wide, smooth river — the Der- 
went, which we last saw at Ayton, 
shadowed by the birches of the Forge 
Valley and overlooked by the ruins of 
Margaret Bromflete's castle. 

This was the first of the monasteries 
founded by Walter of Espec. In front of 
the gateway is the base of an old cross, 
of which the top step is carved with an 
almost illegible design. Local tradition, in 
its courageous way, declares that there is 
incorporated with these steps a fragment 
of the " little stone cross " that caused the 
death of Walter of Espec's son. The truth 
of this tale seems to depend a good deal 
on whether Walter ever had a son. 



CHIEFLY OLD CHURCHES 165 

It is this gateway that we have come 
to see. The fragment of wall in which it 
is framed was probably built in the twelfth 
century, but all this wealth of ornament 
and heraldry belongs to a much later date. 
The quiet valley and the stream would 
suggest to one that this, like Walter's 
Rievaulx, was a Cistercian house ; but there 
was never a Cistercian community that 
would have countenanced all this display 
of tracery and crockets and statuary, and 
all these worldly coats of arms. They were 
Augustinian Canons who made their gate 
so fine, and carved upon it these ten 
shields of men with sounding names — Clare 
and Vaux, Scrope, Ros, Plantagenet — and 
set these saints in their niches, and above 
them the seal of the priory ; and who 
passed to their meals in the refectory 
under all the varied mouldings of this 
magnificent Norman door south of the 
cloister-garth ; and who chanted their Credo 
with their eyes fixed on that lovely lancet 
window, once part of the east-end of their 
church. 

And now we are at last bound for York. 



166 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

We cross the Derwent and climb the hill 
again to the high-road, and there before 
us, very far away, lies our goal. Faintly 
shining, York Minster shows like a pale 
opal hanging above the horizon. 

The very thought of York and all that 
it stands for makes the heart beat faster. 
Let us open the throttle then, and speed 
to it as quickly as we may; for the road 
lies broad and level between the fields, and 
nearly as straight as an arrow's path, and 
never, if we love our engine and our 
England as we should, shall we forget this 
flight of ours to the city of all our kings. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 



SUMMAEY OF TOUR IN THE SOUTH 
Distances. 



York 

Pontefract 

Beverley, via Selby 

Hull 


... 24 miles 
... 45 „ 
... 9 „ 


Total 


... 78 miles 


EOADS. 





Usually good and level. 



IV 

YORK AND THE SOUTH 

"^TO man knows the spell of York till 
-*~^ he has approached it by road in the 
evening. Of all the fresh experiences that 
the motor-car has brought to us there 
are few from which the imagination gains 
so much as from this way of entering old 
and beautiful towns. We have too long 
accepted the roof of a railway station as 
our first view of such places. It is not 
an inspiring view. But to see York Minster 
from afar, shining under the evening 
sky and lifted high above the city ; to 
watch it growing larger and larger, rising 
higher and higher, increasing in beauty 
every moment, until at last one drives 
slowly into its huge shadow; to pass 
under one of the great gates that have 



170 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

survived so many centuries, so many wars, 
so many pageants, that have welcomed so 
many kings, and dripped with the blood 
of so many warriors ; to see the ancient 
streets for the first time idealised by the 
dusk of twilight, will help us, if anything 
will, to recall and realise something of 
what York has been during the eighteen 
hundred years of her history. 

The past is very insistent here. Here 
are the walls, encircling the whole city, 
that were built by Edward I. and repaired 
after the Civil War. We may drive round 
them, and pass in and out of the four 
gates that were once so hard to enter : 
Monk Bar, by which we come in from 
Kirkham under the arms of England and 
France quartered together; and Bootham 
Bar on the Newcastle Road ; and Mickle- 
gate Bar on the Tadcaster Road ; and 
Walmgate Bar, where the restored barbican 
reminds us that it was undermined during 
the long siege of the Civil War. All 
these bars are turreted and ornamented 
with painted shields and statues or helmets 
of stone; three of them still have their 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 171 

portcullises ; three still bear the arms of 
France. 

Walmgate, or Watling Gate, Bar is the 
most picturesque of them on the inner 
side, for it carries on its stone pillars an 
Elizabethan house of timber and plaster. 
But by far the richest in memories is 
Micklegate Bar. Some of these memories 
are of a very ghastly kind, for it was 
here that the heads of " traitors " were 
set up. It was here that Harry Hotspur's 
head looked down upon his doubly treacher- 
ous old father, the Duke of Northumber- 
land, as that time-server rode out through 
the gate in perfect friendliness with 
Henry IV., and found it advisable, no 
doubt, to ignore the thing that stared 
above the parapet. Here, in Henry V.'s 
reign, the head of Lord Scrope of Masham 
was set up because he favoured the House 
of York ; and here, half a century later, 
was the head of the Duke of York himself, 
crowned with paper — to be replaced, almost 
before Margaret of Anjou had finished 
laughing at it, by the head of the man 
who put it here — Clifford the Butcher. The 



172 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

hideous series closed with the followers of 
Prince Charlie in the Forty-five. 

Meantime there were other sights to be 
seen at Micklegate Bar. Richard III., fresh 
from one coronation and eager for another, 
was received here " with great pomp and 
triumph" by the citizens and the clergy 
"in their richest copes," and passed through 
this archway with his stolen crown upon 
his head, followed by his luckless queen 
and the little boy who was so soon to 
die. His successor's daughter, Margaret 
Tudor, entered York very gaily by this 
gate with five hundred lords and ladies, 
on her way to her unhappy marriage with 
James IV. of Scotland. James I. was on 
his way to Scotland, too, when he rode 
to Micklegate Bar from Tadcaster, with 
the sheriffs of York bearing their white 
rods before him. He waited here while 
the Mayor, kneeling in the road, presented 
him with a sword and the city keys, and 
a cup and a purse, " and made a worthy 
speech at the delivery of each particular." 
Still braver was the scene when Charles I. 
came in, with that strange army that was 




MICKLEG Vi'K BAR, STORK. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 173 

no army; the army that was commanded 
by an " amateur general " and was intended 
to overawe the Scots by pomp. "The 
progress was more illustrious than the 
march, and the soldiers were the least 
part of the army," says Clarendon. This 
sombre bar was gay enough that day. So 
splendid a procession has seldom been 
seen as that which filed through its dark 
shadow then, all glittering and glowing, 
while the trainbands of the city, magnifi- 
cent in scarlet and silver and feathered 
caps, greeted Charles with a volley, and 
the civic authorities on their knees greeted 
him with flattery. It was not many years 
before another sort of scene was enacted 
on this spot : when the army of Fairfax — 
commanded by no amateur — was drawn 
up in a double line that stretched away 
from this gate for a mile, and the two 
Royalist generals who had defended the city 
so finely, Glenham and Slingsby, marched 
out between the two lines with the rem- 
nant of the garrison, with all the honours 
of war. That was the most stirring sight, 
I expect, that Micklegate Bar has seen. 



174 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Fairfax and the other victorious generals 
marched to the Minster and " sang a psalm." 
What that psalm must have meant to 
Fairfax we can hardly realise. The siege 
had lasted for thirteen weeks ; more than 
four thousand of his men had died in the 
course of it ; twenty-two times they had 
assaulted the walls. He was himself a 
Yorkshireman, and like all Yorkshiremen, 
loved and honoured the city that has held 
so proud a place in English history, and the 
Minster that is the city's crown. No wonder 
he marched straight from the gate to the 
Minster and sang a psalm ! What York 
Minster meant to Fairfax it must in a lesser 
degree mean to every Englishman. It com- 
bines superlative interest with superlative 
beauty. We may come to it primed with 
its history — the history that begins with the 
Roman temple whose foundations are hidden 
beneath it, the history that includes so many 
great names ; we may know that Paulinus 
of the seventh century — the tall, majestic 
man with the hawk-face whom Bede has 
described for us — built the first church here 
of wood, and was the first Archbishop of 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 175 

York ; that three other churches stood here 
and were destroyed before the present 
building was begun in the thirteenth cen- 
tury and slowly rose to its perfection ; but 
when we see it we can remember nothing 
but its beauty. It completely dominates 
York. It is impossible to forget its presence 
for a moment, whether it be dim and blurred 
in the dawn or flushed with the light of 
sunset. 

Nearly every one, I suppose, has seen it. 
Nearly every one has felt, on passing 
through the entrance in the south tran- 
sept, that breathless sensation of awe that 
is almost fear, of reverence that is almost 
worship. The first sight of those immense 
arches, so absolutely simple, so indescribably 
majestic, with the lancets of the Five Sisters 
behind them, is overwhelming. It is only 
gradually that memory returns, and the 
great nave slowly fills with the processions 
of the past, with the weddings and funerals 
and coronation pageants that have swept by, 
century after century, to choir or chapter- 
house. Young Edward III. and Philippa of 
Hainault were a comely pair when they 



176 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

were married here in the presence of the 
Parliament and Council, surrounded by the 
nobles of England and Scotland. Not very 
many years later their little son was carried 
to his grave in the north aisle of the choir. 
Much was spent in alms and masses, many 
pounds of wax were burnt, many widows 
watched round the little coffin before 
William of Hatfield was laid in this tomb 
where we see his effigy, a slender, boyish 
figure lying very straightly under the high 
canopy. In the next century a sinister 
scene took place here : Richard Crookback 
mourning for his brother, coming here to 
hear a requiem sung, with his head full 
of plots against the dead man's little sons. 
Very soon he was here again, entering 
those splendid doors with the iron scroll- 
work, which lead into the chapter-house 
where he was crowned for the second time — 
the chapter-house that Pius II. described as 
" a fine lightsome chapel, with shining walls 
and small, thin-waisted pillars quite round." 
"As the rose is the flower of flowers," said 
the monks, " so is this the house of houses." 
There are not very many notable tombs 




STORK MINSTER. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 177 

here, though there is much illustrious dust. 
Here was buried the head of King Edwin 
of Northumbria, who so " often sat alone by 
himself for a long time, silent as to his 
tongue, but deliberating in his heart" 
whether he should become a Christian. 
This Minster is in a sense the fruit of his 
deliberations. There is no monument to 
him, nor to Earl Tostig of the violent 
temper, whose body was carried here from 
Stamford Bridge ; but the founder of the 
present building lies in his robes under a 
canopy in the south transept. We may see, 
too, in the Lady Chapel, the marble tomb 
of Archbishop Scrope, the builder of Bolton 
Castle, who preached a sermon in this 
Minster inciting the people to take up arms, 
and lost his head in consequence. And near 
the altar of the same chapel is a little black 
kneeling figure that deserves attention. It 
is a monument to Frances Matthew, the 
wife of Tobie Matthew, Archbishop of York, 
and the daughter of William Barlow, Bishop 
of Chichester. " She had four sisters married 
to four bishops. ... So that a bishop was 
her father, an archbishop her father-in-law, 
13 



178 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

she had four bishops her brethen, and an 
archbishop her husband." Unless I am much 
mistaken she had also an abbess for her 
mother, which was the strangest thing of 
all. There was a William Barlow, at one 
time Bishop of St. David's, who is said to 
have married an abbess as soon as the 
Reformation made it possible, and had five 
daughters married to five bishops. Frances 
Matthew must surely have been one of these. 
Tradition says that Bishop Barlow, who had 
many unpleasant traits, stripped the lead 
from the Palace of St. David's and dowered 
his daughters with it; but Frances must 
have been a baby, if indeed she was born, 
when her father was guilty of this thievish 
vandalism. She herself is described as being 
above her sex, and even above the times — 
but indeed all the women who were buried 
in ages gone by seem to have been superior 
to all the rest. She gave her husband's 
library to the Minster. 

Close to her mural monument is the 
largest window in England. There is no 
building, I believe, that has so much ancient 
and beautiful glass as this, and it is a 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 179 

miracle to be thankful for that it was not 
destroyed in the last century, when the 
poor maniac set fire to the Minster because 
he disliked the buzzing of the organ. The 
soft- toned window of the Five Sisters is the 
loveliest of all. 

But all these are modern things. Down 
in the crypt we shall find ourselves in touch 
with the century of Paulinus and St. Chad 
and St. Wilfrid, the three earliest Arch- 
bishops of York ; for here is the herring- 
bone work of the first stone church, and 
here, they say, are the pillars of the building 
that succeeded it and was destroyed by the 
Danes. This is the spot on which the 
Roman temple stood, and the wooden 
church where King Edwin was baptized, 
and the altar on which Ulphus the Saxon 
laid his horn. This Ulphus was a prince in 
Deira, whose sons were of a quarrelsome 
temper, and were likely, he thought, to fall 
out over the division of his property after 
his death. So " he presently took this course 
to make them equal." He carried his 
favourite drinking-horn, his horn of ivory 
and gold, to York, and filling it there he 



180 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

knelt before the altar of the Minster and 
drank the wine in token that he endowed 
the church with all his lands for ever. 
That this brought peace to his family I 
rather doubt ; but the lands of Ulphus are 
to this day in the possession of York 
Minster, and the horn of Ulphus is to this 
day within its walls. If we go through this 
door in the south aisle of the choir we may 
see it — an elephant's tusk, rich tawny in 
colour, finely carved. It disappeared mys- 
teriously at the time of the Civil War, but 
somehow fell into the hands of Fairfax, 
whose son returned it to the Minster. How 
it came to Fairfax is not recorded ; but is 
it not possible that he may have quietly 
taken possession of it, knowing how unsafe 
it was in the hands of the Puritans, and 
have told his son to give it back in less 
troubled times? Or was it perhaps one of 
those relics which would have " irrecoverably 
perished in the late wars " if Fairfax had 
not paid "that industrious antiquary, Mr. 
Dodsworth," to collect them? We know 
that Fairfax had "a peculiar respect" for 
antiquities, and that it was owing to his 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 181 

unceasing care that the Minster suffered so 
little in the war. 

It is not in a few days that York can be 
seen. Only those really know the place 
who live within the enchanted walls ; we 
should linger here as long as possible, and 
return again and again. Yet those whose 
time is limited will find that even a couple 
of nights spent at the justly famous Station 
Hotel will enable them to see more than 
the Minster without suffering from that 
sense of hurry that spoils pleasure. 

York has not hurried. In the Museum 
Gardens, themselves a wonderful museum, 
we may realise how many centuries she 
has taken to become what she is. Here 
is a tower that was raised by the Romans. 
The date of it is uncertain, but Mr. Well- 
beloved tells us it was probably built when 
the Conquering Legion came to Eboracum. 
This, says Gibbon, was at the beginning 
of the second century ; so this tower of 
many angles takes us back to the time 
of Hadrian, to days before the Emperor 
Severus died here in the palace that has 
altogether vanished, bidding his sons let 



182 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

all their conduct tend to each other's 
good ; days long before the death of Con- 
stantius and the accession of Constantine 
the Great. It is not true that Constantine 
was born in York, but it was here that 
he went through his little performance of 
reluctant modesty when the soldiers made 
him Emperor — weeping and spurring his 
horse while they pursued him with the 
imperial robes. 

In the same garden are the ruins of 
St. Mary's Abbey. The Benedictine monks 
who founded this community came from 
Whitby, and were perhaps the builders of 
the Norman apse we saw at Lastingham, 
where they paused for a time on their 
way to York. It is easy to see that this 
remnant of a most beautiful church was 
not of their raising : there is nothing 
Norman here, nothing but the purest 
Gothic work. It was while the earlier 
eleventh-century church was still standing 
that a strange scene took place here ; 
when the Archbishop of York with his 
retinue clamoured long upon the abbey 
gates in vain, while the abbot refused to 




M \KY S ABBEY, VORK. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 183 

open to him ; then forced his way at last 
into the abbey and pronounced an inter- 
dict — here where the grass grows under 
our feet — against the abbot and his monks. 
The cause of all this commotion was that 
little band of brethren who built the 
Abbey of Fountains with so much toil and 
endurance. They were at that time monks 
of St. Mary's, and had appealed to Arch- 
bishop Thurstan to reform their house. 
Abbot Geoffrey, however, preferred to re- 
main unref ormed ; and so the fiery prelate 
swept off with the zealous thirteen and set 
them down in the wilderness beside the 
Skell to live as austerely as they would. 
The Abbey of St. Mary, in spite of the 
interdict, grew very great as well as 
beautiful. 

Not only at the Dissolution, but far 
later, this monastery was horribly ill- 
treated. Its stones have built a palace 
and a prison ; they have been used for 
mending, and have been made into quick- 
lime. The palace they built has to a great 
extent vanished, but the Tudor house that 
stands near Bootham Bar — the red house 



184 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

with the arms of James I. over the door — 
is either actually a part of it or was 
rebuilt from its ruins. It was in that 
house that Strafford lived when he was 
President of the Council of the North ; 
both James I. and Charles I. stayed in it 
when they came to York ; and it was 
probably there that Henrietta Maria lived 
for three months when she brought ma- 
terials of war to the city. 

There are other stones of St. Mary's 
still to be seen, by which we may partly 
guess the glory that has departed. There 
are countless numbers of them in this 
garden; every flower-bed is bordered with 
them, and the lower part of the guest- 
house, down there across the grass, is 
literally stacked with statues and mould- 
ings and bosses of wonderful richness. 
This Hospitium is used as a museum. It 
is a little bewildering, with its mingled 
associations of mediaeval monks and Roman 
matrons. Here are all the things that we 
are accustomed to see in collections of 
Roman relics — pottery, tiles, jewellery 
everything from a tesselated pavement to 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 185 

a circus ticket. One thing there is, how- 
ever, to which we are not accustomed ; a 
thing whose interest is rather painful, if 
not morbid ; a coil of a woman's hair, as 
bright and brown as if it had been laid 
in its stone coffin only yesterday. The 
hair of poor Flavia or Placida would be 
better buried, I think. 

The prison that was built from the 
stones of St. Mary's Abbey is on the site 
of William the Conqueror's castle. It is 
still called the Castle, but there is nothing 
left of the fortress except one round grey 
tower, standing alone on a little hill. Its 
walls have been concerned with many 
great deeds; much valour has defended it 
and much besieged it ; much English His- 
tory has been made in the shadow of it. 
Yet Clifford's Tower is generally remem- 
bered chiefly in connection with the wild 
scene of horror that took place here at 
the time of Richard I.'s coronation, when 
the Jews of York rushed to the castle 
for shelter, with their ducats and their 
daughters, and were besieged by the mob. 
Here, where the steps wind up between 



186 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

the tidy laurels, the mad crowd yelled and 
battered on the walls, while the White 
Friar who led them shrieked : " Down with 
the enemies of Christ!" Here within the 
tower, where the grass is strewn with 
exquisite fragments of Gothic ornament — 
probably from St. Mary's — the starving 
Jews were huddled with their families 
till they grew desperate. They killed their 
wives and children, and then they killed 
themselves. A few surrendered, begging 
for baptism, converted by these strange 
methods; but they were allowed no bap- 
tism but that of blood. 

As we drive slowly through the streets 
of York, peering now at some carved 
archway, now at some time-worn coat-of- 
arms, passing here under the overhanging 
eaves of St. William's College, or there 
under the lantern tower of St. Helen's, we 
feel that the life of the past is still 
existing in this city, in some strange astral 
way, hidden within the life of the present. 
The past is not merely a picturesque 
memory here. Even if we had never 
heard the magic name of York, I think 




STREET IN YORK 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 187 

we should feel that her streets were 
crowded with figures we could not see. 

A modern note is struck as we drive 
out of the town past the racecourse, and 
find to our pleasure that the splendid road 
is "treated" with some preparation that 
makes it absolutely dustless. This is the 
road by which the Stewart Kings ap- 
proached York with so much show and 
colour, and by which their supporters 
marched away, defeated, but with honours 
of war. Like them, we are going to Tad- 
caster. The middle of the bridge that 
spans the Wharfe at Tadcaster is the 
boundary between the West Riding and 
the Ainsty, or County of York City ; and 
this is why it was the spot where the 
sheriffs welcomed the Kings of England 
when they came to York. It was not on 
this actual bridge, however, that Charles 
was met by the citizens ; for this one was 
made from the ruins of the castle early 
in the eighteenth century. Both castle and 
bridge, it would seem, were useless by the 
time they had passed from hand to hand 
in the Civil War. Tadcaster was an im- 



188 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

portant place then, an outpost of York ; 
even as its predecessor, Calcaria, had been 
an outpost to Eboracum. 

A couple of miles beyond Tadcaster we 
pass through the village of Towton. It 
was near here, in the fields that lie 
between the main road and the river 
Cock, that the White Rose overcame the 
Red after ten hours of " deadly battle 
and bloody conflict." It was on the night 
before the actual battle that Lord Clifford 
and his company " were attrapped or they 
were ware," and Clifford, having taken off 
his gorget for some reason, was killed by 
an arrow "stricken into the throat." 
" This end had he," says the chronicler, 
" which slew the young Earl of Rutland 
kneeling upon his knees." If we leave the 
high-road for a few minutes, turning to 
the right beyond Towton, we shall be 
crossing the actual battlefield, the ground 
that was such a horrible medley of snow 
and blood on that Palm Sunday when 
" both the hosts approached in a plain 
field," the ground in which the Yorkists 
stuck the spent arrows of the Lancastrians, 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 189 

"which sore annoyed the legs of the 
owners when the battle joined." The 
falling snow, too, " somewhat blemished 
and minished" their sight, and the end of 
it was that King Henry's men turned and 
fled towards Tadcaster. We cannot see 
" the little broke called Cocke " from this 
spot, but there on the right is the depres- 
sion in the fields through which it runs. 
So many men were " drent and drowned " 
that day in the Cock that their comrades, 
it is said, crossed the stream on their dead 
bodies, and even the river Wharfe was red 
with blood. From this scene of slaughter, 
which "did sore debilitate and much 
weaken the puysance of this realme," 
Edward IV. rode into York as its master. 
At Saxton we turn to the left and rejoin 
the high-road to Pontefract, and after some 
miles of good going but cheerless scenery 
we cross the Aire at Ferrybridge. It was 
this crossing of the Aire at Ferrybridge 
that caused the death of Clifford the 
Butcher on the eve of Towton ; for he, 
"being in lusty youth and of frank 
courage," attempted to prevent Edward of 



190 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

York from passing the river, and so was 
himself cut off from the Lancastrian army. 
He did actually secure the bridge. Lord 
Fitzwalter was keeping the passage for 
Edward "with a great number of tall 
personages," but Clifford and his light- 
horse stole up to this spot early in the 
morning " or his enemies were ware, gat 
the bridge, and slew the keepers of the 
same." This was the beginning of the 
carnage of Towton. Lord Fitzwalter, hear- 
ing the racket, rose from his bed and 
hurried, poleaxe in hand, to join in the 
fray, but " before he knew what the 
matter meant" he was killed. A few 
hours later Clifford, too, was dead. 

For the last few minutes we have been 
travelling on the road that holds, per- 
haps, for road-lovers, more glamour in its 
name than any other — the Great North 
Road. We have no time to think of the 
romance of it, of the millions who have 
trodden its dust, of the gay-hearted vaga- 
bonds or anxious kings who have passed 
this way, for we turn from it too soon 
and take the road to Pontefract. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 191 

I do not know if it was on this identical 
road between Ferrybridge and Pontefract 
that Edward IV. and Warwick rode out to 
the field of Towton ; it was in any case on a 
very different surface. The town of Ponte- 
fract itself is strangely unimposing for a 
place of such great renown ; the houses are 
unpicturesque, the surrounding country dull. 
Yet Camden says it is sweetly situated, 
and is remarkable for producing liquorice. 
There are other things for which Ponte- 
fract has been remarkable in its day ; but 
as we mount the slope into the long, 
straggling town there is little to show 
that it has ever been concerned with 
affairs of more vital importance than 
liquorice. There is, it is true, a fine church 
greatly ruined on our right, which has the 
air of having lived through a good deal. 
It was battered to pieces in the course 
of three sieges, and the transept only has 
been rebuilt. The strange Perpendicular 
tower, of which the lower part is square 
and the upper octagonal, seems oddly 
enough to have suffered less than the 
body of the building, for it has been very 



192 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

little restored. This church of All Saints 
was connected with a religious house 
whose brethren served the castle chapel ; 
but it was not the abbey that Camden 
" industriously omits " from his description 
of Pontefract, because even in his day 
there was hardly a sign of it left. In his 
day the walls of this forlorn nave were 
still unbroken, and rising high above it 
on the hill were all the towers of the 
castle, a splendid cluster, with the great 
Norman wall encircling them, and the 
Round Tower of Ilbert de Lacy tallest of 
all. Of this " high and stately, famous 
and princely impregnable castle and citadel," 
as it was called only a few years before 
the Civil War, there is deplorably little 
for us to see. Hardly one stone was left 
upon another by General Lambert. The 
debris were heaped over the foundations, 
soil was spread over all, and the sinister 
fortress whose walls had echoed the sighs 
of royal prisoners and the last groan of 
a king, the " guilty closure " that was 
drenched with blood and tears, was devoted 
to the rearing of silkworms and other such 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 193 

innocent uses. During the last century, 
however, a good deal was excavated, and 
we may without great difficulty find out 
the scene of much that has happened here. 

" Oh, Pomfret ! Pomfret ! thou bloody prison, 
Fatal and ominous to noble peers ! " 

The names of those to whom it has been 
fatal make a long list. The most illustrious 
name on that list is Richard Plantagenet. 

That Richard was by some means done 
to death in this castle is, I believe, certain ; 
but how he died and where is unknown. 
The old tale that tells how Sir Piers 
Exton and his eight men rushed into the 
room where the imprisoned king was 
dining, and how Richard " right valiantly 
defended himself," but was finally struck 
on the head with a poleaxe by Sir Piers, 
who "withal ridded him of his life in an 
instant," was discredited when Richard's 
grave at Westminster was opened, and 
the skull, which was perfectly preserved, 
showed no mark of a blow. Another 
theory is the one believed by Northumber- 
land and Harry Hotspur, who accused 
14 



194 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Henry IV. of having traitorously caused 
their sovereign lord and his "with hunger, 
cold, and thirst to perish, to be murdered." 
If we skirt the lawn-tennis court and turn 
down a little path to the left we shall 
find, behind the raised bowling-alley, a 
fragment of vaulted ceiling and a wall 
with three little recesses in it. This is 
reputed to be Richard's prison. I do not 
know if there be any real evidence that 
it was so. There is certainly not the 
evidence of a continuous tradition ; for 
until the siege destroyed it a room in 
the round tower was shown to visitors as 
the scene of Piers Exton's fabulous exploit 
with the poleaxe — a room in which there 
was a post all hacked and cut by the 
blows aimed at the King ! When the post 
disappeared the scene of Richard's death 
moved to this Gascoign Tower where we 
see the vaulted ceiling. It is curious how 
often the only fragment left of a building 
happens to be the scene of the event in 
the building's history that is most likely 
to appeal to popular sentiment. One grows 
suspicious of local traditions ! 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 195 

Richard II. was not the only prince 
to be imprisoned in Pontefract Castle. 
James I. of Scotland was here, and with 
him were the Dukes of Orleans and 
Bourbon and other prisoners taken on 
the field of Agincourt. Henry V. was a 
little anxious at one time lest he should 
lose " the remnant of his prisoners of 
France," for a plot was on foot to rescue 
them. "I will," wrote the King, "that the 
Duke of Orleans be kept still within the 
Castle of Pomfret, without going to Robert's 
Place or to any other disport; for it is 
better he lack his disport than we were 
deceived of all the remnant." 

Of all those who actually met their 
death here Thomas Earl of Lancaster — 
he whom Gaveston called the Actor — had 
the hardest fate. The place belonged to 
him, and he had done much for it. Among 
other things he built or repaired the tower 
called Swillington, the tower that was 
destined to be his own prison, whose 
fragments we may see down there guard- 
ing the moat on the north side. His 
hatred of Gaveston and the Despencers, 



196 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Edward II.'s favourites, brought him to 
this plight ; to this dark tower whose walls 
he had made so thick, whose entrance was a 
trap-door in the roof; to his mock trial by 
his enemies in the great hall that stood here 
on the north side of the lawn ; to his con- 
demnation and ignominious death. It was 
here within this court, somewhere near the 
northern boundary wall, that he stood fac- 
ing the Despencers as they venomously 
sent him to the block ; it was here that 
he uttered his last despairing words : " Shall 
I die without answer ? " Then they muffled 
his head in an old hood and set him, the 
King's uncle, on " a lean mare without a 
bridle," and so led him out among the 
mocking soldiers to his death. We can 
see, from the castle ramparts, the hill 
where he was beheaded. It is called St. 
Thomas's Hill to this day, for later on he 
was canonised and his grave in St. John's 
Priory became a shrine. The site of the 
priory — the monastery that Camden indus- 
triously omitted — is between the hill and 
the castle. 

Pontefract was fatal to many of Edward 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 197 

IV.'s followers and kin. Before his final 
triumph at Tewkesbury some of his 
supporters were imprisoned here. " John 
Pylkyngton, Mr. W. att Cliff, and Fowler ar 
taken," we read in the Paston Letters, "and 
in the Castyll of Pomfrett, and ar lyck to 
dye hasty ly, withowte they be dead." Very 
hastily, too, and without trial, Edward's 
brother-in-law Lord Rivers, and stepson 
Sir Richard Grey died here by order of 
Richard III. 

It really seems as though there had been 
something sinister in the atmosphere of this 
place. Even its one gay memory — the visit 
of Henry VIII. and his fifth bride — is over- 
shadowed by the scaffold ; for it was here 
that Katherine Howard put a weapon into 
her husband's hand by making Francis 
Derham her private secretary. 

Indeed Pontefract has no cheerful annals: 
they are all of battle, murder, and sudden 
death. There was very little bloodshed, I 
believe, when the leader of the Pilgrimage 
of Grace took the castle ; but who can 
guess how many died during the three 
sieges of the Civil War ? The place was 



198 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

Crown property, but after two sieges it 
surrendered to the army of the Parliament. 
It is rather difficult to ascertain by what 
particular form of treachery it was re- 
covered by the Royalists. The deed was 
done, in any case, by one Colonel Marris, 
whom Clarendon describes as "a stout and 
bold undertaker in attempts of the greatest 
danger." Stout and bold he certainly was, 
but not very attractive ; for he began by 
deserting the royal cause, and then, when 
he wished to turn his coat again, was 
enabled to carry out his plot by his close 
friendship with the governor. Being always 
welcome he made friends with some of the 
guard. The garrison, as it happened, needed 
new beds, so when Marris and some others 
appeared at the gates laden with beds they 
were admitted at once. They carried the 
beds into that solid-looking house that was 
on our right as we entered the castle, the 
house that bears the arms of Lancaster over 
the door. It was the Main Guardhouse. 
There they flung the beds upon the floor 
and overpowered the friendly guard. 

So Pontefract came back to the Crown, 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 199 

the Parliamentary garrison were imprisoned 
in the magazine, and the third siege began. 
The magazine in which Colonel Cotterell 
and his men lived for eleven weeks is 
under the lawn-tennis court. If you borrow 
a taper from the custodian you can go 
down into it, and read, on the wall of the 
staircase, the names that some of these 
soldiers cut in the stone. 

When the time came for discussing terms 
of surrender General Lambert said that 
Marris and five others must be given up to 
him. The governor asked and was granted 
six days in which the six men might do 
their best to escape. On the fifth day they 
had all disappeared and the garrison sur- 
rendered. Two of the six, however, were 
still within the castle, in a secret place 
beneath the Pipe Tower, which stood over 
there beyond the Norman Keep. They were 
walled up "with great store of waste 
stones," and had food for a month beside 
them. The situation was a critical one. 
They heard their garrison march away, 
some to Newark, some to the enemy's camp, 
some to their homes, the officers with their 



200 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

horses and arms, even the men with Port- 
mantles and Snapsacks ; heard the rumbling 
of the three waggons that carried the 
wounded ; heard, during ten awful days, the 
incessant clamour and crash of the first 
hurried dismantling of the castle, the 
clamour that might be their death at any 
moment ; heard at last the withdrawal of 
the Parliamentary troops. Then they took 
down their wall of waste stones, and stole 
away. 

These men who imprisoned themselves 
were the last prisoners of Pontefract Castle, 
for after this the historic ground was sown 
with liquorice ; but the Main Guardhouse 
was spared, as we see, and for another 
century or two kept up the gloomy tradi- 
tions of the place as a prison. 

The country that lies between Pontefract 
and Beverley is by no means beautiful. It 
is so aggressively dull that it may almost 
be called ugly. It is not for the sake of 
the scenery, truly, that we cover so many 
miles of Southern Yorkshire, but chiefly for 
the sake of Beverley Minster; and there are 
many, no doubt, who will prefer to make 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 201 

York or Pontefract the last stopping-place 
of their tour. Those who do not care for 
historical memories unless there be some- 
thing beautiful connected with them I 
advise to drive across from York to 
Beverley by the most direct road. 

Half-way between Pontefract and Knot- 
tingley we have once more a flashing 
glimpse of the Great North Road and the 
immense signposts that mark its dignity, 
and are in themselves a lesson in geo- 
graphy ; at Chapel Haddlesey we cross a 
toll-bridge. These are the only incidents 
on this singularly uneventful route until 
we reach Selby; but as all good motorists 
very well know, the road without incidents 
is often as happy as the country without 
history, and the particular road that lies 
through these melancholy fields and un- 
attractive villages is very fine. Those who 
depend on horses or trains cannot vary their 
speed according to the beauty of the 
country, but to us is given the special joy 
of sauntering through lovely landscapes and 
hurrying on when there is nothing to be 
seen. 



202 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

In 1906 the name of Selby was brought 
into tragic prominence by the fire that 
made its abbey roofless and " only not a 
wreck." But as there are disastrous 
victories so there are beneficent calamities ; 
and Selby Abbey, it seems, whose restora- 
tion has already been a triumph of energy, 
will soon be more complete than it has 
been since 1690, when the tower fell and 
ruined the south transept. 

This grand church is the work of many 
hands. It is a mixture of every style of 
architecture, both within and without: 
Early Norman, Transition, Early English, 
Decorated, Perpendicular. The west front, 
for instance, has a splendid Norman door- 
way with five mouldings, and above it an 
Early English window filled with Perpendi- 
cular tracery. No part of this building was 
raised by the founder ; and indeed it was 
not to this exact spot, but nearer to the 
Ouse, that Benedict of Auxerre, bringing 
with him " the glorious finger " of St. 
Germanus and the memory of a heavenly 
vision, came to set up his hut. The first 
benefactor of the foundation was the man 




WEST DOORWAY OF SELBY ^BBEY. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 203 

who presented a tent to shelter the relic, 
round which a cluster of wooden buildings 
grew, and formed the first monastery of 
Selby. William the Conqueror gave land, 
and a charter, and many privileges ; and 
Abbot Benedict won from the Pope 
the much-coveted honour of the mitre. 
William's charter was dated the year after 
the birth of Prince Henry, and its great 
generosity, it is said, was prompted by the 
fact that Selby was the birthplace of this 
favourite son of the king, Henry the fine 
scholar, Henry the lion of justice. To him, 
says an old chronicler, " Almighty God gave 
three gifts— wisdom, victory, and riches." 
Yet his wisdom failed him, alas, in the 
matter of lampreys ! 

It was Abbot Hugh, a member of that 
great house of de Lacy which gave so many 
fine buildings to England, who raised the 
abbey on the spot where it still stands. 
That massive pillar at the east end of the 
nave, the pillar with the spiral mouldings, 
was part of his work. It is even possible 
that some of its stones were actually laid 
in their places by his strenuous hands, for 



204 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

he worked with the builders. It is a fine 
picture — the beautiful pillar rising course by- 
course towards the open sky, as Hugh de 
Lacy, abbot and noble, with infinite care 
and reverence fixed each stone in its place 
with a hyrnn of praise. 

The later abbots, the three who in the 
fourteenth century raised the choir that has 
been called peerless, were men of another 
fashion — not especially humble — members of 
Parliament, entertainers of kings, men of 
the world. Yet to them, too, we owe much 
gratitude for all this splendour of ornament, 
these capitals and bosses, this great east 
window, this flowing parapet that is so 
often repeated. And, as a nation, we owe 
gratitude to all those whose work or money 
has helped in the recent restoration.* 

There is nothing but the abbey itself to 
keep us in Selby. There is no sign by 
which we may know the spot where Sir 
Thomas Fairfax, by defeating the Royalists 
and capturing their colonel, first made his 
name honoured. We do know, however, 

* Many of the facts connected with Selby are derived 
from Mr. Moody's handbook. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 205 

that he and his troops marched to Selby 
on that occasion by this wondrously level 
road upon which we drive away. For the 
first mile or so, until we turn away from 
the Ouse, we are on the road that used 
to be, in the old coaching days, called the 
lower road to York. It diverges from the 
Great North Road at Barnet, and though 
not the main highway, was the more direct 
route, and therefore the one chosen by 
those who were in a hurry. It is for a 
very short time that we are on it ; but 
surely, for a moment, above the humming of 
the engine, above the rushing of the wind, 
we hear the ringing of Black Bess's hoofs. 

Five level miles bring us to the door of 
Hemingborough Church, which is large and 
renowned, but of a dreariness so gaunt 
and bare that it altogether fails to charm. 
Its walls, unsoftened by creepers, rise from 
the treeless landscape in uncompromising 
severity ; and inside the building the colour- 
less effect is equally depressing, in spite of 
some fine woodwork. The tall and slender 
spire is really beautiful, however, and may 
be seen for miles across the plain. 



206 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

To visit Wressle Castle we must leave 
the direct road to Howden, turning to the 
left immediately after crossing the Derwent. 
Here again the sad landscape seems to 
have infected the building. Theoretically it 
has all the elements of romance, and to 
read of it without seeing it is to conjure 
up a picture of decaying splendour, of 
venerable walls eloquent of revelry and 
war, a picture worthy of the great names 
of Percy and Lacy and Seymour. A castle 
founded by that Earl of Worcester whose 
headless body lies in Shrewsbury Abbey 
because he fought for Richard II.'s lost 
cause, a castle that has seen all the might 
of the Northumberlands and all the tragedy 
of civil war, must surely have "the grand 
air." So one thinks till one has seen 
Wressle. In the background is a building, 
shabby but not ruined ; in the foreground 
is a cabbage-patch. 

Yet once this place was all magnificence, 
made " al of very fair and greate squarid 
stone both withyn and withoute." Leland 
tells us of its halls and great chambers, 
and its five towers, and its brewhouse with- 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 207 

out the wall, and its "botery, pantery, 
pastery, lardery, and kechyn." All these 
things were exceedingly fair, he says, and so 
were the gardens within the moat and the 
orchards without. It was here where the 
cabbages are that those fair gardens grew. 
And in the orchards were mounds, " writhen 
about with degrees like turninges of cokil- 
shilles, to cum to the top without payn." 
Most fondly of all he describes the " study 
caullid Paradise," with the ingenious device 
of ledged desks for holding books. There, 
looking down upon us from the upper part 
of the tower nearest to the road, are the 
empty windows of that Paradise whose in- 
habitants were driven out of it for ever 
by the flaming sword of Civil War. 

This is only a fragment of the original 
castle. The Northumberlands needed a con- 
siderable amount of house-room, for they 
had, it appears, two hundred and twenty-nine 
servants. There were gentlemen to wait 
before noon and gentlemen to wait after 
noon, and gentlemen to wait after supper ; 
there were yeoman officers, and groom 
officers, and grooms of the chambers ; 



208 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

there was a groom for brushing clothes, 
a groom of the stirrup, a groom to dress 
the hobbies and nags, a groom to keep 
the hounds, a groom to keep the gates, 
and an endless list of others. The day 
came when the servants in this house were 
called upon by the Parliament to demolish 
it themselves, and were given a month to 
do it in. This one side of the quadrangle 
was all they left. It is possible, I believe, 
to climb one of the towers to see the view 
— but I cannot think it desirable. The view 
from the bottom of the tower is not so 
attractive as to make one wish for more. 
A very great relief to the eye is Howden, 
about three miles further on. The town 
itself is not without a certain degree of 
picturesqueness, though it was scarcely a 
happy thought to surmount the ancient 
steps of the cross in the market-place by 
a modern street lamp. However, from that 
same market-place we see, behind the red 
houses, the ruined gable-end of the church 
that is Howden's pride, whose lovely tower 
is one of the landmarks of the plain. The 
peculiarly slender and graceful effect of 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 209 

this tower is partly owing, I think, to the 
unusual height of the lower stage compared 
with the upper. Those tall lancets were the 
work of Walter Skirlaw, Bishop of Durham, 
whose palace stood over there to the east of 
the church, where the pretty gardens are. 
If we venture a little way on foot along 
that lane at the corner of the square, we 
may see, without trespassing, the beautiful 
old ivy-covered wall and the blocked gate- 
house with the shield upon it, within which 
the bishops of Durham were wont to seek 
rest and change. Camden's tale, to the effect 
that Bishop Skirlaw built " the huge tall 
steeple " as a refuge for the inhabitants in 
times of flood, need not be believed ; it was 
probably the invention, as a certain quaint 
old book suggests, of " some doating scribe, 
desirous of assimilating the steeple of 
Howden Church to the tower of Babel." 

In the thirteenth century the Archbishop 
of York, seeing that this church was " very 
wide and large," and rich enough to support 
" many spiritual men," made it collegiate. 
Hence arose the need for the chapter-house 
that Walter Skirlaw built on the south side 
15 



210 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

of the choir, and made so ■wonderfully- 
beautiful that even now, robbed as it is of 
its groined roof and much of its rich orna- 
ment, it dwells in one's mind as a thing apart. 
The Decorated choir, which was first the 
work and afterwards the shrine of the 
thirteenth-century poet, John Hoveden, is 
itself a ruin ; for when the church lost its 
prebends and its riches in the reign of 
Edward VI. there was neither need nor 
means left for keeping this part of the 
building in repair. The nave is still the 
parish church. 

After leaving Howden we have to pass, 
with what speed we may, over ten more 
miles of absolutely level, absolutely unin- 
spiring country. Then we go through North 
Cave, where George Washington's ancestors 
used to live ; and at last the road begins to 
rise over Kettlethorpe Hill. The flat land 
is laid out like a map below us ; far 
away upon the horizon — which is level as 
the sea— rises "the huge tall steeple" of 
Howden ; and between the plain of York- 
shire and the rising-ground of Lincolnshire 
are the sullen waters of that great river 




CHAPTEB HOI SE, HCWDEN. 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 211 

that has brought England so much of 
her prosperity. Not always, however, has 
the Humber brought prosperity. More 
than a thousand years ago the fleet of 
the avenging Danes, Hinguar and Hubba, 
swept up between these low banks, to lay 
this rich country waste. Right into the heart 
of the land they sailed, and ceased not to 
destroy till all the country of the fens was 
desolate. Now this calamity and much more 
besides — the destruction of Lindisfarne and 
Whitby, of Croyland and Ely and Peter- 
borough, and the death of St. Edmund the 
King — was brought about by the jealousy of 
one obscure individual. For Lothbroc the 
Dane, being a guest at Edmund's Court, had 
showed so much skill in the trapping of birds 
and beasts that the King's head-keeper, as 
one may call him, was " inflamed with mortal 
envy." So he slew Lothbroc treacherously. 
Then the King sent the murderer to sea in a 
little boat, without sail or oars, and the boat 
drifted to the shores of Denmark. And the 
wicked keeper sought the sons of Lothbroc, 
whose names were Hinguar and Hubba, and 
told them that their father had been slain 



212 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

by order of King Edmund. So Hinguar 
and Hubba swore by " their almighty gods 
that they would not leave that murder 
unpunished " ; and verily they fulfilled 
their oath. 

Two hundred years later another Dane, 
Sweyn of the Forked Beard, "a cruel man, 
and ready for the shedding of blood," sailed 
up to conquer the north. Just beyond that 
island that lies close to the left bank, where 
we see the Ouse suddenly widen into the 
Humber, Sweyn turned into the river Trent. 
And " all England groaned like a bed of reeds 
shaken by the west wind." 

At the top of the hill we pass through a 
wonderful avenue of beeches and sycamores ; 
then run down a long and pleasant slope into 
Walkington ; and soon the blue towers of 
Beverley appear. 

The brief run across the common above 
Beverley will probably be the last of our 
memorable moments in Yorkshire : the last 
of those memories which we motorists — while 
the days are long and the winds are soft and 
the engine purrs contentedly hour after hour 
— hoard up to enjoy again and again, not 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 213 

only through the winter but through the 
years. This particular moment is a very short 
one ; but it will be long, I think, before we 
forget the beauty of the town of Beverley as 
it lies in the blue dusk of a summer evening, 
with its matchless towers dominating it. 

Yes, surely, they are matchless ! See how 
the straight, clean lines of their tall buttresses 
— those parallel lines that are repeated again 
and again in the Perpendicular panels, and 
even in the deep shadows cast by the 
masonry — give the impression of slenderness 
and height. Not anywhere, not at Lincoln, 
not at York, are there towers of a design 
so complete and finished, of a simplicity so 
exquisite. Nowhere else does the accumu- 
lation of straight lines produce so rich a 
whole ; nowhere else are the very shadows 
used to enhance the effect. There is much 
that is beautiful in Beverley Minster, but in 
the main it is these twin towers that are 
going to be our compensation for all those 
miles we have driven between flat fields, 
" enclosid," as Leland says, " with hegges." 

The monastery of Beverley was founded, 
or at all events much frequented in the 



214 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

eighth century, by a certain Archbishop of 
York, who retired hither "out of a pious 
aversion to this world," and has been known 
ever since as St. John of Beverley. Bede's 
account of this saint is well worth reading. 
He was a man of many miracles, of much 
kindliness, of some sharpness of tongue. 
Never was there a saint of so much common- 
sense, mingled with the compelling power 
that works miracles in every age. There 
was a " dumb boy," for instance, who had 
also a sore head. The archbishop devined the 
nervous nature of the dumbness, and cured 
it so thoroughly that the youth talked in- 
cessantly for a day and a night, as long as 
he could keep awake. Then the archbishop 
" ordered the physician to take in hand the 
cure of his head." The shrewd saint recog- 
nised his own limitations. On another 
occasion he was brought to heal a dying 
nun. "What can I do to the girl," he 
asked tartly, " if she is like to die ? " 

Such was St. John of Beverley, of whom 
we may see a picture, though not, I fear, 
a portrait, in the south transept of this 
minster. It represents him receiving from 




i *> -• 




B E VE RL] y , 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 215 

King Athelstane a charter with a portentous 
seal and the following legend : — 

" Als fre make I the 
as hert may thynke 
or egh may see." 

King Athelstane, it is true, was by no 
means a contemporary of St. John of 
Beverley, but he regarded the saint as his 
special benefactor, and gave many privileges 
to Beverley on that account — so the symbolism 
is pretty even if the picture is not. If we 
walk along the nave till we are beneath 
the second boss of the vaulted roof, counting 
from the east, we shall be above the spot 
where John of Beverley's dust has lain for 
many centuries. He was originally buried in 
the porch ; probably his bones were moved 
when the Saxon Church was replaced by a 
Norman one. I do not know on what 
authority the local guide informs us that 
Athelstane's dagger is in this grave. Gibson, 
who in his additions to Camden describes 
the opening of the tomb in the seventeenth 
century, makes mention of no dagger, but 
only of the sweet-smelling dust, and the six 



216 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

cornelian beads, and the brass pins and iron 
nails. Athelstane, it is true, left his dagger 
as a hostage on St. John's grave while he was 
fighting the Scots ; but the story says that 
he redeemed it on his return by re-founding 
the monastery as a college, and granting 
it the right of sanctuary. Hence the legend 
on the charter. 

In the north aisle of the choir, near the 
entrance to the Percy Chapel, is the visible 
symbol of that right of sanctuary, the Frid- 
stool, the plain rounded seat in which he 
that sat was safe even though he were 
a murderer, the sacred centre of the six 
circles that conferred each its own amount 
of security. To this Stool of Peace, in the 
days when it stood beside the altar, many 
a man — indeed many a ruffian — has owed 
his life and the freedom he so little 
deserved. It was to this very seat that 
Richard II.'s half-brother, Sir John Holland, 
came hurrying through the night. Frois- 
sart tells the story, how Holland and Lord 
Ralph Stafford met in a lane but could 
not see each other for the darkness. "I 
am Stafford," said one. "And I am 



YORK AND THE SOUTH # 217 



Holland," said the other, and added : " Thy 
servants have murdered my squire whom 
I loved so much." Then he killed Lord 
Ralph with a blow. Stafford's servant 
cried out that his master was dead. "Be 
it so," said Sir John ; " I had rather have 
put him to death than one of less rank, 
for I have the better revenged the loss of 
my squire." In spite of this haughty atti- 
tude, however, he lost no time in taking 
refuge here. The beautiful towers were 
not in existence then, but the nave through 
which he hastened was this Decorated 
nave that we see now, and these Early 
English arches were above him as he sat 
in the sanctuary, and close to him was that 
wonderful canopied tomb near the altar, 
supposed to be the grave of Eleanor, Lady 
Percy. 

If it were not eclipsed by the minster 
the church of St. Mary at Beverley would 
be more famous than it is, for it, too, is full 
of beauty and interest. But only those 
who are very enthusiastic lovers of archi- 
tecture, or who are able to spend some 
days in the town, will risk confusing their 



218 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

memories of the first with the details of 
the second. 

Beverley, though never fortified, had once 
three gates. Of these only one still stands, 
the North Bar. Beneath its crow-stepped 
parapet Charles I. must have passed with 
an angry heart when he rode out to York 
after his futile expedition to Hull. And it 
is very likely that we, if we are going 
south, shall drive out of Beverley upon the 
same road by which he came from Hull the 
night before, with the first open defiance 
of one of his own towns ringing ominously 
in his ears. 

Who thinks of history when he goes to 
Hull? It is, no doubt, like all great com- 
mercial centres, of paramount interest to 
its inhabitants ; but to the traveller what 
is it? A starting-place, a place where there 
are docks, railway stations, hotels. Even 
that increasing band of travellers who are 
learning, with the help of bicycles and 
motor-cars, to know their country with the 
intimate knowledge that nearly always 
means love, to linger in its historic towns, 
to seek its little villages, and to eat the 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 219 

familiar bacon-and-eggs of its wayside inns, 
even these are fain to pass through Hull 
with no thought beyond their anxiety to 
reach some other place. Beyond the two 
old churches of Holy Trinity and St. Mary 
there is nothing here to see except a good 
deal of prosperity and the squalor that 
prosperity brings. 

Yet even these wide streets of central 
Hull, with all their prosaic traffic, should 
take our thoughts back to Edward I. These 
things are the justification of that astute 
and high-handed king ; they are the ful- 
filment of his prophecy. This sheltered 
corner of the Humber, he thought, would 
make a fine position for a commercial 
town. To think of a thing was to do it at 
once, with our first Edward ; so he bought 
the land from the Abbey of Meaux, made 
himself a manor, called the place King's 
Town, built some houses, and paid people 
to live in them. Well, there may be some 
even now who would have to be paid to 
live in Hull ; but none the less Edward 
was wise here as in most other places. 

And, moreover, as we reach the outskirts 



220 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

of this town we may recall that one of 
the most dramatic scenes in English his- 
tory was enacted here — that defiance of 
Charles I. at the walls of his own town, 
which was the gauntlet flung by the 
Parliament. 

War was yet not declared, but there was 
great store of ammunition in Hull which 
might, thought Charles, be useful by and 
by. So he, with two or three hundred 
others, set out from York to see about the 
matter, and as he drew near this town — 
fortified then with a great wall and many 
towers — he sent a message to bid the 
governor dine with him. I do not know if 
there is any vestige left of the wall to 
which Charles presently came, or any 
record of the spot where he paused, dumb- 
founded, before the gate. This, he surely 
thought, as he scanned the walls and the 
closely shut gates and the hostile draw- 
bridges, this was a strange welcome to his 
city of Hull, the King's Town ! Here were 
no sheriffs marching out to meet him as 
at York, nor gay trainbands, nor kneeling 
mayors ; but walls manned with soldiers 



YORK AND THE SOUTH 221 

who were anything but gay, and inhospit- 
able gate-keepers whom he could by no 
means persuade to let him pass, and on the 
ramparts the unhappy governor, Sir John 
Hotham. "And when the King commanded 
him to cause the port to be opened," says 
Clarendon, "he answered like a distracted 
man that no man could understand ; he fell 
upon his knees, used all the execrations 
imaginable, that the earth would open and 
swallow him up if he were not his 
Majesty's most faithful subject." Yet in 
spite of all his protestations this man "of 
a fearful nature and perplexed under- 
standing " was quite clear in his mind as to 
what his intentions were, and not too fear- 
ful to carry them out. The King should 
not come in. 

Then solemnly, from below the wall they 
might not enter, the King's officers made 
proclamation that Sir John Hotham, 
Governor of Hull, was a traitor ; and 
Charles, with his head high but his spirits 
very low, rode on to Beverley in the 
shadow of the Great Rebellion. 

Our plight at this moment is not the 



222 MOTOR TOURS IN YORKSHIRE 

same as his. If his difficulty was to enter 
Hull, ours lies in the leaving of it — sup- 
posing, that is to say, that we wish to 
cross the Humber by the ferry. There are 
no arrangements of any kind for shipping 
cars. A narrow, precipitous gangway, with 
a right-angled turn in the middle, is the 
only means of passing from the quay to 
the ferry-boat. The transit is a matter of 
difficulty for any car — for a large one it is 
impossible. Hull, however, is a progressive 
place, as befits the town of that most pro- 
gressive king who saw its possibilities so 
long ago. Very soon, we cannot doubt, the 
shipping of a car on the shores of the 
Humber will be less like a feat in a circus 
than it is at present. 



INDEX 



Agincouet, Battle of, 195 

Ainsty of York, 187 

Airedale, 15 

Aire, River, 13, 189 

Alan, Count of Brittany, 73, 

79 
Alfred the Great, 36, 37, 44 
Alfrid, King of Deira, 36 
Allerston, 124 
Anne Boleyn, 160, 161 
Appleton-le-Moor, 133 
Arkengarth Dale, 71 
Arthur, King, 74, 75 
Aske Hall, 79 
Aske, Robert, 113 
Askrigg, 57, 66, 67 
Athelstane, King, 215, 216 
Atton, Family of, 122 
Aysgarth, 56 
Ayton Castle, 122, 164 

Bainbeidge, 57 

Baliol, Bernard, 82, 83 

Baliol College, 83 

Baliol, Guy, 82 

Baliol, John, the elder, 83, 84 

Baliol, Oohn, King of Scotland, 

82,83 
Barden Moor, 57 
Barden Tower, 19, 21 
Barlow, Bishop, 177, 178 
Barnard Castle, 65, 81, 82-84 
Barnet, 205 
Bay Town, 107 
Bear of Warwick, 50 
Beatty, Sir William, 55 
Beckett, Thomas a, 28 
Bede, The Venerable, 35, 76, 

129, 140, 174, 214 
Bellyseys, Richard, 47 



Benedict, Abbot of Selby, 202, 

203 
Beverley, 4, 200, 201, 212-218, 

221 
Black Bess, 205 
Blubberhouses, 25 
Boar of Gloucester, 50, 83 
Bolton Bridge, 22, 25 
Bolton Castle, 57, 59-66, 177 
Bolton, Lord, 56, 59 
Bolton Priory, 5, 11, 21, 23-25, 

149 
Bolton Woods, 21, 22 
Bootham Bar, York, 170, 183 
Bosham, St. Wilfrid at, 36 
Bosworth, Battle of, 159 
Boulby Cliff, 95 
Bourbon, Duke of, 195 
Bowes, Sir George, 61, 65 
Boy of Egremond, 22, 23 
Brandon, Lady Eleanor, 8 
Brandsby, 154, 157 
Bridlington, 119 
Brodelay, Abbot of Fountains, 

42 
Bromflete, Margaret, 122, 164 
Brompton, 123, 124 
Bronte, Anne, 115, 116 
Bronte, Charlotte, 15, 115, 116 
Bronte Country, The, 15 
Brotton, 94, 95 
Brougham Castle, 20 
Bruce, David, 74, 75 
Bruce, Family of, 92-95, 125 
Bruce, Robert, 94 
Buckden, 17 
Buckingham, First Duke of, 

135, 143, 144, 145 
Buckingham, Second Duke of, 

133-135, 141, 144-146 



224 



INDEX 



Buckingham, Katherine 

Duchess of, 143, 144 
Buckingham, Mary Duchess 

of, 144 
Burgh, de, 28 
Burleigh, Lord, 53, 54 
Burnsall, 19 
Buttertubs Pass, 4, 58, 59, 67- 

69 
Byland Abbey, 26, 153, 154 
Byland, Old, 152, 153 
Byron, Lord, 78 

CiEDMON, 101, 104, 105 
Camden, Quotations from, 12, 

14, 17, 35, 91, 191, 192, 196, 

209 
Carlyle, Thomas, 33, 114 
Cavendish Memorial at Bolton, 

23 
Chapel Haddlesey, 201 
Charles I., 28, 74, 172, 173, 

184, 187, 218, 220, 221 
Citeaux, 152 
Civil War, 9, 31, 33, 34, 53, 65, 

100, 113, 114, 126, 135, 144, 

170, 180, 187, 192, 197-200, 

204, 207, 208, 218, 220, 221 
Clairvaux, 151 
Clapham, 11, 14 
Clarence, Duke of, 159 
Clarendon, Quotations from, 

143, 173, 198, 221 
Clares, Arms of the, 165 
Claughton, 109 
Cleveland Moors, 4, 79, 91, 92, 

95, 108, 131 
Clifford "the Butcher," 7, 19, 

20, 122, 171, 188-190 
Clifford, Family of, 6-11, 15, 

122 
Clifford " the Shepherd Lord," 

7, 8, 11, 19-21, 24, 122 
Clifford's Tower, York, 185, 186 
Clitheroe, 30 
Cock, River, 188, 189 
Colman, 104 
Compiegne, 36 
Coniston, 12, 13 



Conistone, 18 

Conquering Legion, 181 

Constantine the Great, 162, 181 

Constantius, Emperor, 181 

Cook, Captain, 91, 96, 97 

Cotherstone, 84 

Cotterell, Colonel, 199 

Cover, River, 50, 54 

Coxwold, 154, 157 

Craven, 5-15 

Cromwell, Oliver, 28, 30, 31, 

33, 34 
Cromwell, Thomas, 41, 42, 47 
Cropton, 127 
Croyland Abbey, 211 
Culloden Tower, Richmond, 74 
Cumberland, First Earl of, 11, 

24 
Cumberland, Third Earl of, 7, 

10 
Cynebil, 129 

Dairy Bridge, 80 

Dales, The, 1-86, 89 

Danes, The, 35, 105, 109, 120, 

179, 211, 212 
Darlington, 90 

Defoe, Quotations from, 54, 57 
Derham, Francis, 197 
Derwent, River, 122, 164, 166, 

206 
Despensers, The, 195, 196 
Devorgilla, Princess, 83 
Dissolution of Monasteries, 24, 

41, 42, 46, 47, 72, 77, 93, 183 
Dodsworth, Roger, 156, 180 
Douglas, Black, 112, 113 
Dropping Well at Knares- 

borough, 31 
Dugdale, 151, 156 
Duncombe, Charles, 134, 142, 

145, 147 
Duncombe Park, 141, 147 155 

Eanfled, Queen, 35, 105 
Easby Abbey, 56, 77, 78 
Easington, 95 
East Ay ton, 123 
East Witton, 50 



INDEX 



225 



Eata, 35 
Ebberston, 124 
Edmund, King, 211, 212 
Edred, King, 36 
Edward tbe Confessor, 137-139 
Edward I., 83, 170,219, 222 
Edward II., 8, 11, 196 
Edward III., 175, 176 
Edward IV., 51, 159, 189, 191, 

197 
Edward V., 162 
Edward, son of Richard III., 

52, 161, 162, 172 
Edwin, King of Northumbria, 

177, 179 
Eggleston Abbey, 82 
Elfleda, Princess, 105 
Elizabeth, Queen, 7, 10, 53, 62, 

63, 135 
Elizabeth, Queen of Spain, 62 
Elizabeth of York, 159, 160, 162 
Ellerton Priory, 72 
Eliot, George, 22, 26 
Ely, 211 
Embsay, 23 
Embsay Moor, 15 
Espec, Walter of, 142, 148, 

150-152, 164, 165 
Ethelfled, daughter of Alfred 

the Great, 73 
Ethelwald, King of Deira, 128, 

139, 140 
Euer, Family of, 122 
Evesham, 77, 106 
Exton, Sir Piers, 193, 194 

Fairfaxes, Castle of the, 156 
Fairfax, Sir Thomas, 144, 145, 

173, 174, 180, 204, 205 
Ferrybridge, 189-191 
Filey, 119 

FitzHugh, Sir Henry, 45, 47 
FitzHughs, Castle of the, 84 
Fitzranulph, 51 
Fitzwater, Lord, 190 
Flamborough Head, 119 
Flodden, Battle of, 8 
Forge Valley, 119, 121-123, 

127, 164 



Fors, 47, 66, 67 

Fossard, Family of, 99 

Foston, 163 

Fountains Abbey, 5, 13, 17,26, 

37-43, 149, 183 
Fountains Hall, 43 
Fox, George, 114, 115 
Froissart, Quotations from, 

216, 217 
Furness, 153 

Gallows Hill, 123 

Galtres, Forest of, 157, 158 

Gargrave, 12 

Gaveston, Piers, 28, 112, 126, 
195 

Geoffrey, Abbot of St. Mary's, 
183 

George IV., 74 

George Washington, 210 

Gibson, Editor of Camden, 
215 

Giggleswick, 14 

Gilling, 73, 78, 79 

Gilling, East, 156 

Glastonbury, 105 

Glenham, General, 173 

Godiva, Lady, 73 

Godwin, Earl, 138 

Goldsmith, Peter, 55 

Gordale Sear, 13 

Grasmere, 123 

Grassington, 19 

Great North Road, 79, 190, 
201, 205 

Great Whernside, 17 

Greta Bridge, 80 

Greta, River, 80, 81 

Grey Friars' Tower, Rich- 
mond, 77, 79 

Grey, Sir Richard, 197 

Grimston Moor, 157 

Gros, William le, 112 

Guisborough, 91-94 

Gunnerside, 70 

Hackness, 119-121, 122 
Hall, John, 95 
Hambledon Moors, 79 



10 



226 



INDEX 



Hamilton, Duke of, 31 

Harnpton Court, 62 

Harald the Norseman, 111 

Harold II., 139 

Harrogate, 25-28 

Harry Hotspur, 171, 193 

Hartington Seat, 23 

Hastings, Lord, 51 

Hawes, 57, 67 

Haworth, 15 

Helaugh, 71, 75 

HeUifield, 11, 13 

Helmsley, 134, 141-147, 154, 

156 
Hemingborough, 205 
Henrietta Maria, Queen, 184 
Henry I., 203 
Henry III., 112 
Henry IV., 126, 171, 194 
Henry V., 7, 45, 195 
Henry VI., 189 

Henry VII., 75, 93, 122, 160 

Henry VIII. , 8, 46, 77, 93, 
161, 197 

High Force, 85, 86 

Hill House, Richmond, 78 

Hinderwell, 98 

Hinguar and Hubba, 105, 109, 
211, 212 

Hipswell Moor, 57 

Hodge Beck, 136 

Holland, Sir John, 216, 217 

Hospitiumof St. Mary's, York, 
184, 185 

Hotham, Sir John, 221 

Hoveden, John, 210 

Howden, 206, 208-210 

Hubberholme, 17, 18 

Huby, Abbot of Fountains, 41 

Hull, 33, 218-222 

Humber, 211, 212, 219, 222 

Huntingdon, Lord, 53 

Hutchinson, Joanna, 123 

Hutchinson, Mary, 123 

Ingilby, Lady, 34 
Ingleton, 11, 14 

James I., 135, 144, 172, 184 



James I. of Scotland, 195 
James IV. of Scotland, 93, 

172 
Jervaulx Abbey, 26, 42, 44, 45, 

46-49, 66 
John of Austria, 63 
John of Gaunt, 28, 71, 75, 

126 
John of Kent, 41 
John, King, 32 

Kathebine Howaed, 160, 197 
Keldholme, 133 
Kettlethorpe Hill, 210 
Kettlewell, 17, 18 
Kilnsey Crag, 16, 17 
Kingsley, Charles, 49, 50 
Kirbymoorside, 133-135, 145 
Kirkdale, 136-141 
Kirkham Priory, 150, 151, 

163-165, 170 
Kirkstall Abbey, 26 
Knaresborough, 28-33, 126 
Knaresborough, Forest of, 27 
Knollys, Sir Francis, 61-64 
Kncttingley, 201 

Lacy, Family of, 203, 206 
Lacy, Hugh de, 203, 204 
Lacy, Ilbert de, 192 
Lambert, General, 192, 199 
Lancaster, Duchy of, 126 
Lancaster, Thomas, Earl of, 

126, 195, 196 
Lass of Richmond Hill, 78 
Lartington, 84 
Lastingham, 127-132, 136, 140, 

182 
Leeds, 26 

Leeds Waterworks, 25 
Leland, Quotations from, 32, 

60, 76, 100, 110, 125, 150, 

206, 207, 213 
Lewes, George, 22 
Leyburn, 57 
Leyburn Shawl, 65 
Lindisfarne, 35, 211 
Linskill, Mary, 101 



INDEX 



227 



Linton, 19 
Loftus, 95 

Lothbroc, 105, 109, 211 
Low Row, 70 
Lune, River, 85 
Lythe, 99, 100 

Macaulay, Lord, 134 
MacNally, 78 
Malham, 11, 12, 13 
Margaret of Anjou, 20, 171 
Margaret, Princess, daughter 

of Henry VII., 93, 172 
Marmion, Family of, 44-46 
Marrick Priory, 71, 72 
Marris, Colonel, 198, 199 
Marston Moor, Battle of, 29, 

31, 34 
Marton-in-Cloveland, 91 
Marton-on-the-Forest, 157 
Mary, Princess, daughter of 

Henry VII., 8 
Mary Queen of Scots, 60-G5 
Masham, 46 
Matthew, Archbishop of York, 

177 
Matthew, Frances, 177, 178 
Mauley or de Malo-Lacu, 

Family of, 99, 100 
Meaux, Abbey of, 219 
Melrose Abbey, 152 
Mercia, Earls of, 73, 79 
Meschines, Alice de, 22, 23 
Micklegate Bar, York, 170, 

171-173 
Mickleton, 85 
Middleham, 26, 44, 49-54, 58, 

162 
Middlesbrough, 89, 90 
Middleton-in-Teesdale, 84, 85 
Milbank, Miss, 78 
Monk Bar, York, 170 
Mortham Tower, 80, 81 
Morton, Earl, 142 
Morville, de, 28, 29 
Muker, 70 

Mulgrave Park, 99, 100 
Multangular Tower, York, 181, 

182 



Nawton, 140 

Nelson, 55, 155 

Neville, Anne, 51, 52, 161, 172 

Neville, Family of, 51, 83, 135, 

159, 160 
Newark, 199 
New Row, 100 
Nidd, River, 32 
Nine Altars, Chapel of the, 

Fountains, 41 
Norfolk, Duke of, 160 
North Cave, 210 
North Sea, 106, 111 
Northumberland, Duke of, 

171, 193 
Norton, Christopher, 61 
Norton, Family of, 15, 16 

Orleans, Duke of, 195 

Oswaldkirk, 155, 156 

Oswini, monk of Lastingham, 

129-131 
Oswy, King, 103-105 
Otley, 30 
Ouse, River, 202, 205, 212 

Paston Letters, Quotation 

from, 197 
Pembroke, Countess of, 8-10, 

21 
Penda, King of Mercia, 103 

105 
Pendragon Castle, 20 
Percy, Family of, 205-208 
Percy, Lady, 217 
Percy, William de, 121 
Peterborough, 211 
Philippa, Queen, 28, 29, 175, 

176 
Pickering, 123, 124-127 
Pilgrimage of Grace, 39, 42, 48, 

49, 113, 197 
Pius II., 176 
Plantagenets, Arms of the, 

164 
Pontefract, 29, 126, 189-201 
Pope, Alexander, 71, 133, 134 
Premonstratensian Order, 77 
Preston, Battle of, 31 



228 



INDEX 



Quincy, Peter de, 67 

Redmire, 57, 59, 60 

Reeth, 70, 71 

Reinfrid, 105 

Ribblesdale, 14 

Richard I., 185 

Richard II., 28, 29, 126, 192- 
195, 206, 216 

Richard III., 8, 51, 62, 83, 110, 
159, 161, 172, 176, 197 

Richard, first abbot of Foun- 
tains, 39 

Richard, second abbot of 
Fountains, 40 

Richmond, 44, 57, 58, 71, 72- 
79,83 

Rievaulx Abbey, 5, 26, 147- 
152, 154, 165 

Rievaulx Woods, 154 

Ripley, 33, 34 

Ripon, 26, 33, 34-37, 43, 44 

Rivers, Lord, 197 

Roald, Constable of Richmond, 

78 
Robert Curthose, 142 
Robin Hood, 108 
Robin Hood's Bay, 106, 107 
Robin Hood's Butts, 106 
Rokeby, 81 
Rokeby Park, 80 
Romaldkirk, 84 
Romilles, Family of, 6 
Ros, Family of, 142, 143, 165 
Rosamund, the Fair, 11 
Roseberry Topping, 91, 92 
Roucliffe, Sir David, 125 
Runswick Bay, 98, 99 
Rutland, Earl of, 7, 19, 188 
Rye, River, 149, 152, 154, 155 
Rylstone, 16 
Rylstone Fell, 15 
Rylstone, White Doe of, 15, 16 

St. Bernard, 151, 152 
St. Cedd, 128-131, 139, 140 
St. Chad, 128-131, 179 
St. Columba, 104 
St. David's, 178 



St. Germanus, 202 

St. Helena, 162 

St. Hilda, 98, 103-105, 109, 

120, 121 
St. John of Beverley, 103, 

214-216 
St. John, Family of, 122 
St. John's Priory, Pontefract, 

196 
St. Mary's Abbey, York, 39, 

131, 182-185 
St. Mary's Church, Beverley, 

217 
St. Norbert, 77 
St. Paulinus, 76, 174, 179 
St. Robert of Knaresborough, 

31-33 
St. Thomas's Hill, Pontefract, 

196 
St. Wilfrid, 34-36, 37, 103, 104, 

179 
St. William's College, York, 

186 
Saltburn, 94 
Sandsend, 100, 101 
Saxon Remains, 35, 55, 79, 
120, 124, 131, 137-140, 155, 
179 
Saxton, 189 
Scalby, 119 
Scarborough, 106, 109-116, 119, 

141, 164 
Scott, Sir Walter, 80, 81 
Scrope, Archbishop, 60, 177 
Scrope, Lord, of Masham, 171 
Scropes of Bolton, 56, 60, 65, 

78, 164 
Seaton, Mary, 64, 65 
Sedburgh, Abbot of Jervaulx, 

48,49 
Selby, 201-205 
Settle, 14 

Severus, Emperor, 181 
Seymour, Family of, 206 
Sheffield, Lord, 99 
Sheriff Hutton, 155, 157-163 
Shrewsbury Abbey, 206 
Sidney, Sir Philip, 143 
Skell, River, 183 



INDEX 



229 



Skelton, 93-95 
Skipton, 5-11, 15, 20, 30 
Skirlaw, Walter, 209 
Slingsby, Captain, 27 
Slingsby, Sir Henry, 33, 173 
Stafford, Lord Ralph, 216, 217 
Stafford, Lord Thomas, 113 
Staithes, 96-98 
Stamford Bridge, 177 
Standard, Battle of the, 28, 

112, 142 
Station Hotel, York, 181 
Sterne, Laurence, 95, 154, 157 
Stewart, Charles, the Young 

Pretender, 172 
Stillington, 157 
Stocking, 153 
Stockton-on-Tees, 89, 90 
Stonegappe, 15 
Strafford, Earl of, 184 
Stray, The, 27, 28 
Strid, The, 21-23 
Studley Park, 38, 149 
Studley Royal, 38 
Stuttevilles, de, 28, 32, 133 
Suffolk, Duke of, 8 
Surrey, Earl of, 161 
Sutton-in-the-Forest, 157 
Swale, River, 58, 70, 71, 72, 76, 

81 
Swaledale, 16, 57, 58, 67, 69-79 
Sweetheart Abbey, 83, 84 
Sweyn, 212 

Tadcaster, 170, 172, 187, 188 
Tees, River, 4, 81, 82, 85, 89 
Teesdale, 16, 81-86 
Tewkesbury, Battle of, 197 
Thirsk, 153 
Thirsk, Abbot of Fountains, 

41 
Thornton Force, 15 
Thornton-le-dale, 124 
Threshfield, 16 
Thurstan, Archbishop, 43, 182, 

183 
Tillotson, Archbishop, 155 
Tintern, 149 
Tosti, Earl, 137-139, 177 



Towton, Battle of, 7, 19, 20, 

188-191 
Trent, River, 212 
Trinity Chapel, Richmond, 76 
Turner, 80 
Tutbury, 65 

Ulphus, 179, 180 
Ulphus, Horn of, 180 
Upgang, 101 
Upleatham, 94 
Ure, River, 44, 54, 67 

Vaux, Arms of, 165 

Victoria, Queen, Accession of, 

132 
Victory, H.M.S., Surgeons of, 

55 

Wada the Giant, 99 
Wakefield, Battle of, 19 
Wakeman, The, of Ripon, 36, 

37, 44 
Walkington, 212 
Walmgate Bar, York, 170, 

171 
Warwick, Earl of, the King- 
maker, 51, 159, 191 
Warwick, Earl of, son of Duke 

of Clarence, 159, 160 
Weathercote Cave, 15 
Wensley, 44, 55, 56, 59, 78 
Wensleydale, 16, 26, 54-67 
Wesley, John, 107 
West Ayton, 123 
Westminster, 29, 52, 63, 135, 

145, 193 
West Tanfield, 44-46, 47 
Wharfe, River, 16, 17, 21, 22, 

23, 81, 187, 189 
Wharfedalo, 16-25, 26 
Wharton, Duke of, 71 
Whitby, 36, 99, 101-106, 103, 

120, 131, 182, 211 
Wilfrid's Needle, 35 
William I., 28, 29, 73, 142, 185, 

203 
William II., 82 
William of Hatfield, 176 



230 



INDEX 



William the Lion, 74, 83 
William of Malmesbury, Quo- 
tations from, 103, 138 
Worcester, Earl of, 206 
Wordsworth, Dorothy, 123 
Wordsworth, William, 13, 16, 

123 
Wressle Castle, 206-208 

Yabm, 89, 90 
Yordas Cave, 15 



Yorebridge, 57 

York, 4, 26, 52, 53, 62, 73, 158, 

163, 164, 165-187, 189, 201, 

205, 220 
York Minster, 158, 166, 169, 

174-181 
York, Richard Duke of, 20, 

171 

Zetland, Marquess of, 79 
Zetland Hotel, Saltburn, 94 






DNWIN BROTHERS, LIMITED, PRINTERS, WOKING AND LONDON. 



